Works of Palestinian couple on show in UAE
▶ Tamam El Akhal and her husband Ismail Shammout were pioneers of modern Palestinian art. Their works intersected and influenced each other over the course of 50 years, and are now on show at Sharjah Art Museum. Melissa Gronlund delves into their backstor
“Inot only shared my studio with Ismail, but everything,” says Tamam El Akhal of her life with fellow artist and husband Ismail Shammout. The pair met at art school in Cairo after being driven out of their homes in Palestine during the Naqba in 1948: El Akhal from Haifa and Shammout from Lydda. Famously, Shammout journeyed by foot to Jordan, aged only 18.
El Akhal and Shammout were pioneers of modern Palestinian art. As part of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) they created posters that activated resistance in Palestine, and organised exhibitions that helped communicate the Palestinian reality to an international audience. They were also a famously close couple, entwined both in life and in their work.
“Before we got married, he asked me how I would feel if ‘we become two wings of the same dove and call it Palestine’,” recalls El Akhal, who is still painting, now in Jordan. Shammout died in 2006 but El Akhal hasn’t stopped using “we” to talk about her life.
“We could fly across the world to show what truly happened as opposed to the common belief that Palestinians have sold their land and fled their country.”
Their work is the subject of an illuminating exhibition at the Sharjah Art Museum, as part of its “Lasting Impressions” series of overlooked Arab artists. It starts from the pair’s paintings of the 1950s to their work with the PLO – the high point of the show – and ends on work they produced in the 1990s and 2000s, including Shammout’s six-metre-wide Exodus
of People. (The exhibition unfortunately could not bring in any panels from Shammout’s 12-panel Exodus and Odyssey, which is similar to the latter in style. The pair only worked on two paintings together, both of them from that cycle.) It’s a chance to see the beginnings of modern Palestinian art – and also to see the work of El Akhal, who, in a dynamic depressingly familiar, has never enjoyed the same recognition as her husband.
El Akhal puts this down to biases that existed in the Arab world at the time, and which arguably are changing now.
“Unfortunately, in the Arab world, they exaggerate when they say that ‘he is a man and she is a woman’,” she says. “When I participate in exhibitions abroad, the foreigners advertise me and Ismail separately. This is when I feel that I am at the same level as Ismail. Whereas when I paint a powerful and meaningful piece of art, the Arab press credit Ismail by listing his name in the Arabic newspapers because they do not believe that the painting was produced by a woman.” She laughs. “They turn a blind eye to the signature.”
The show rectifies this, by focusing neither on gender, nor even solely on Palestine, but instead allows a glimpse into the life of two artists whose work intersected and influenced each other’s over the course of 50 years.
The exhibition begins with the work painted while the pair were living in Cairo: portraits and still-lifes with traditional Arab foodstuffs made in an academic, European style. Even at this stage they were wellknown; Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s president at the time, personally opened a show of Shammout’s work. In 1965, the style and subject matter abruptly shift. The pair joined the PLO, which was established the year before, and began making posters and paintings as part of the Palestinian struggle. Where El Akhal painted Unemployment in 1956 personified by a figure seated on a wooden chair, head slumped, in 1965 the female figure of Shammout’s PLO is a proud mother, head erect, white scarf crisply angled, as she protectively embraces her children and confronts her unseen enemy.
This was a crucial period of Palestinian work; El Akhal and Shammout, as well as contemporaries such as Mustafa Al Hallaj and Abdul Hay Mosallam Zarara, helped create the iconography of the Palestinian cause that still circulates visually: the mother as a cipher for Palestine, environmental details such as orange groves or olive trees, or traditional clothing such as embroidered dresses or the checked kaffiyeh. The PLO artists helped turn these motifs into emblems – a shorthand for Palestinian self-sufficiency and identity.
Artists were also involved at an organisational level. Shammout was director of the arts section of the PLO and later Secretary General of the Union of Palestinian Artists. He and El Akhal contributed to the frequent exhibitions abroad that were organised by the PLO among its allies. Several of these shows have become iconic, in part because their contents have been lost. Documentation, and some of the works themselves, from the International Exhibition for Palestine in 1978 were destroyed in an air strike on the PLO office during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Works from an exhibition that Shammout organised in Beirut at the Karama Gallery were lost in the same conflict.
El Akhal underlines that despite their shared subject, their presentations differed: “We both reflect in our paintings the plight of our people, which both Arabs and foreigners are able to read and interpret. But each one of us would paint it differently.”
“We both used the same studio to produce our works of art but each one of us occupied a space in a different corner,” she continues. They used to play the same music, though she says that at times, she would pop on headphones to listen to Oum Koulthoum or Mohamad Abdel Wahhab.
Their work shifted over the years in style, both in tandem and apart. Shammout, for example, wends from the expressive Boy on a Rope, of a young child tightrope-walking against a painterly blue background, to the surpassingly powerful, more folkloric portrait of 1970, of a white-scarved woman staring determinedly forward. El Akhal likewise switches register from portraits to crowd scenes to landscapes, each subject given a different treatment at times. She has an extraordinary appreciation for the dignity of labour, as in two scenes of “samed” (or resistance) workshops in the 1970s: elegant illustrations of people deep in concentration.
Their work shifted again in 1982, when the PLO leadership and exiled Palestinian art community dispersed after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The pair themselves left Beirut two years later, resettling in Kuwait.
Their work turned away from immediate depictions of Palestinian struggle: Shammout painted beachscapes with fishing boats and El Akhal the interiors of houses. But the spectre of Palestine remained. Martyred families sit on the doorsteps of those houses; in another painting of El Akhal’s, a young boy struggles to hold up the limp, lifeless body of a nude man, draped over his shoulder. Around this time, El Akhal also started to include the motif of a white horse, which she says came as a response to the massacres of Sabra and Chatilla in 1982.
“I wondered, ‘where are the Arabs?’”, she recalls. “No one reacted and there were no demonstrations. I was very frustrated. I happened to read a book at that time about a white horse [that] describes a thirsty horse refusing to kneel down and drink the water he was served. It confirmed the saying ‘We will die in a standing position and refuse to kneel down and surrender’.”
This is an exhibition of historical value, and part of the joy of seeing it in the Sharjah Art Museum context is – paradoxically – to lift the pair from the historical role they played. Particularly because early Palestinian art was so closely wedded to its end goals, there is a difficulty in appreciating it beyond the part it played in the Palestinian struggle.
This is also reinforced by the fact that many of the images of Palestine become similar after a time: heroic villagers and anguished survivors are moving, but not in repetition. The museum’s organisation of this show, in rooms off a ramped corridor, adds to a feeling of dogged chronology; it would be nice to vary the engagement with the works a bit, but the museum setting overall enlivens the pieces. The white horse, for example, connects heartbreakingly to Kadhim Hayder’s Fatigued Ten Horses Converse with Nothing (The Martyr’s Epic), of grief and mourning during the violence in Iraq after the Baathist coup in 1963, which is on view in the museum’s Barjeel rooms.
Shammout’s and El Akhal’s commitment was to Palestine, but this exhibition helps broaden the reach of their contributions.
Lasting Impressions: Ismail Shammout and Tamam El Akhal is on show at Sharjah Art Museum until December 15