Ghosts are notoriously difficult to exorcise. Like tragedies, they leave their mark, whether in real life or literature. In Hamlet,
the protagonist’s dead father repeatedly urges him to avenge his
murder; by the end, after most of the cast has perished, best friend
Horatio promises to retell Hamlet’s story throughout ‘the unknowing world’. As long as the tale is retold, the ghost will continue to haunt us all.
It is from Shakespeare’s stage directions for the Ghost that
Israeli-born artist Bashir Makhoul found the title of his latest
exhibition, Enter Ghost, Exit Ghost. But how does an artist from the Middle East bring Shakespeare to China? Born in 1963 to an Arab or – depending how you look at it –
Palestinian, Catholic family in Galilee, Makhoul takes his complex
identity with him wherever he travels. Twenty-one years ago, he
relocated from Israel to the UK, where he has built a career as a
professor, writer and artist. Now he’s in Beijing to launch his seventh
major solo exhibition in 798’s Yang Gallery.
‘There will be 100 metres of cardboard walls covered with 40 panels
taking up this space,’ Makhoul says, waving at one half of the gallery.
As we sit, surrounded by piles of flattened cardboard and wooden boxes,
he takes me on a virtual laptop journey through his artwork of the same
name.
We move through a maze constructed from tall cardboard walls, each
covered with lenticular micro-lens photos. These hologram-like images
contain two photographs on one surface; as the viewer moves, the image
changes. Makhoul takes out some prints from the boxes, and the
kaleidoscopic effect is unsettling. You have to walk to see the images
shift, but it is impossible to predict how and when you will see
pictures of real cities or cardboard ones – sometimes they even overlap.
One of these images is of a fake town Makhoul made from cardboard
boxes. The simple, haphazard structures mimic those of poorer Arabic
communities. But if you keep moving, other photographs, taken in East
Jerusalem, Hebron and refugee camps such as Shu’fat, also emerge. Like
the news images that perpetually haunt us, some are repeated at
different points in the maze, dislocating and disorientating the viewer
further.
The installation is meant to remind us that the images we are fed
of Israel and the Gaza region by the media cannot be the whole truth.
These places, despite the nationalist, Biblical and news-fed myths
associated with them, are real, ever-changing and, like ghosts, cannot
be defined by a picture. ‘It’s something that we invented ourselves, but
we can’t even describe. If we do, we describe it in so many different
ways. It’s something intangible,’ says the atheist Makhoul, observing
that only a child might think they really know what God looks like.
Makhoul himself grew up with nine siblings in devastating poverty.
His father was crushed under a tractor when the artist was just five
and, by his own admission, his childhood was ‘miserable’. The family
depended on their mother, a ‘real hero’ who kept her children fed and
encouraged them to be successful. Makhoul later trained as a carpenter,
making violins and other fine pieces, earning enough to make his way to
university overseas. But he never forgot his past and carried with him
his humanist and political ideals, a belief in justice and a concern for
the place of his birth where much of his family remain today.
It is only after the presentation that Makhoul, perched on the
corner of a small sofa and fuelled by a triple espresso, finally
recounts the artwork’s history. The tale begins out in the Israeli Negev Desert, where lies one of the country’s few ‘ghost towns’, as he calls them.
Dubbed ‘Chicago’ by Israeli and US forces when it was built in the
1980s, he tells of a makeshift town created as a training location for
‘Military Operations on Urban Terrain’. Never built for habitation, the
concrete city is a shell of a typical ‘Arab’ town. Complete with a
peaked mosque, it has been used by the Israeli Defence Force to prepare
for invasions into Beirut, the last Gaza evacuation and, more recently,
by the US military.
‘They built a whole city out of concrete, similar to my cardboard
boxes, for training,’ explains Makhoul, his relaxed demeanour cracking
slightly to betray deeper emotions. ‘Be it for operations in Gaza,
Hebron or Hanin, they built a city of concrete to practise on. They are
merging training and playing with killing; that’s what makes the whole
thing so absurd for me, and that’s why I think it’s worth us talking
about it.’ In his hands, ghosts come alive and the maze of buildings
becomes more about the fragility of human life in urban war zones.
Like Hamlet’s Ghost, Makhoul’s spectre emerges in the
artist’s personal search for justice for those lives devastated by the
Palestinian conflict. Just as the Ghost haunts Hamlet because he seeks
justice for his murder, ‘You shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that this
piece [‘Enter Ghost, Exit Ghost’] is about death,’ says Makhoul. And for
all its playfulness, it is a message that will not die. Clare Pennington
Originally posted on Time Out Beijing
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