New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
CT’s Palestine Museum to be featured in Venice Biennale
When the international Venice Biennale, an international art show in its 59th year, opens later this month, a relatively new Connecticut museum will be there too. Its very presence is a statement.
It is the Palestine Museum US in Woodbridge, founded in 2018 by Faisal Saleh as the only museum in the Western Hemisphere dedicated to Palestinian art. For the Biennale, Saleh has put together an exhibit of 19 Palestinian artists from around the world. Many have work in his museum and many feel displaced, like Saleh himself.
He was born and grew up in the West Bank after his family lost their ancestral home during the civil wars that followed the creation of the state of Israel. He came to Connecticut as a teenager in 1969, joining a brother who lived in Branford, and he went on to make a career in employee benefits, not art.
“I don’t want to get into the politics of it,” Saleh said after a recent trip to Venice, “but suffice it to say a lot of Palestinians live in exile. The museum’s mission is to preserve the Palestinian culture and Palestinian history — to strengthen the Palestinian identity — because there are a lot of people trying to say there is no such thing as Palestine and there are no Palestinians. We all know there are millions of Palestinians. They exist. They just don’t have a state.”
One of the 30 artworks in the Palestine Museum’s exhibit in Venice will be under foot. It is an enlarged map of Palestine’s historic boundaries that overlaps with modern Israel.
“That might be a bit controversial,” Saleh said, recognizing that “art and politics intersect sometimes.”
Another politically laden piece hangs from the ceiling. It is a sack made from keffiyeh cloth, the kind used in traditional Middle Eastern head scarves, filled with messages and letters from Palestinian refugees. It was created by Ibrahim Alazza, who teaches at Northeastern University and is one of the exhibit’s younger artists.
The very status of the museum at the Biennale has political undertones. It is one of 31 non-profit institutions invited as a so-called Collateral Event. It cannot qualify as a national pavilion, Saleh said, because Italy, like most of Western Europe and the U.S., does not recognize Palestine as a state.
Most of the artwork in the exhibit are paintings and less overtly political. “Green Hills,” an idyllic orchard landscape more than nine-feet wide comes from the “In Pursuit of Utopia” series done by Nabil Anani, who is considered a pioneer of contemporary Palestinian art.
An abstract painting of reds, purples and yellows that appear to be flaming upward is by Samia Halaby, who was born in Jerusalem but later became the first full-time woman associate professor at the Yale School of Art. Now in her 80s and living in Brooklyn, Halaby wrote in a catalog prepared for the exhibit that while her painting, “Venetian Red,” may provoke thoughts of red velvet or fire her original intent was to capture the motion of waves, and not just those in water. Waves, she wrote, can also be seen in a “migrating herd of animals or school of fish, moving and bifurcating, then rejoining the main group depending on obstacles.”
To be chosen as a Collateral Event, an institution must apply with plans for a full exhibit. For that Saleh had the help of art curator Nancy Nesvet. Nesvet, who is based in Wisconsin, happens to be Jewish, he said. They submitted their application in October and learned of acceptance in late December. Fundraising was done to pay for the exhibit costs.
The Venice Biennale, usually considered the world’s number one art fair, officially opens April 23 and runs through Nov. 27. Some 200 individual artists are included in the main pavilions. There are also 84 national pavilions. The U.S. pavilion features, for the first time, the work of a Black woman: sculptor Simone Leigh.