VERA TAMARI
A Dance
Dyptich
2009
Caressed by time, wrapped by the narrative of the land, twisted by the gusty winds of history, impregnated with abundance, this is to me how the olive trees in the hills of Palestine take form. They are like female dancers twirling around in a slow but deeply intense and sensual Sufi trance. They are mother centurions who for centuries have stood fiercely there to protect and defend. They are like tale tellers whispering their stories across the landscape, singing their ballad to the world. Olive trees to me are like women, embodying great wisdom, love and sensuality.
Going for a Ride?
Art Installation
2002
Cars are powerful icons in our society-Other than being urban household commodities, cars have become a metaphor of daily life. These inanimate objects even carry an emotional significance to most people. Not for me I never owned a car nor learnt to drive one, but seeing my friend Liza’s Volks Wagon Beetle as I peeked from behind the shutters of my window one morning made me shudder. That quaint red car in which we often rode,was visibly smashed. It was lying on its hood wheels up- almost like a real dead beetle.
In Going for a Ride? Those inanimate objects, symbols of well being, status and freedom have in an act of vindictive violence, perpetrated by the military tanks in the 2002 invasion of Ramallah taken a new reality. They metamorphosed from once practical objects to become subjects of vengeful voodooism. Do we hurt the Palestinians more by destroying their cherished personal belongings??
My idea in making this installation was not to merely to fashion junk as an art form or an anti gesture as advocated by the Nouveau Realiste or Dada artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Cesare in their crashed car compositions. Both artists challenged the conventional notion of art as an aesthetic exercise. I simply wanted to make a statement how a mundane logical reality becomes totally illogical through the violence of the war machine.
It is hard to see my installation of smashed cars as not carrying a political meaning.
700 hundred private and public cars were smashed in the military incursion of Ramallah only. I wanted to give those cars a voice - an ironic reflection on the unnecessary nature of violence whose authors were the Israeli occupation forces. This act of destruction became like action art disturbing the status quo of matters.
The soldiers in this case have become the artists/creators
The soldiers the viewers
The soldiers as re-creators The installation piece kept changing it had a new energy each time- more violent than the previous one.
I was merely the curator
From a presentation by the Vera Tamari in a conference entitle Art and War organized by the Goethe Institut Nov. 2004 in Ramallah.
Born in Jerusalem, Vera Tamari is a visual artist, Islamic art historian, art educator and curator. She received her undergraduate degree in Fine Arts from Beirut College for Women in 1966. She specialized in ceramics at the Istituto Statale d’Arte per la Ceramica in Florence, Italy in 1974 and obtained an M. Phil. Degree in Islamic Art and Architecture from the University of Oxford in 1984. She served for more than two decades as professor of Islamic Art and Architecture and Art History at Birzeit University, where she also founded and directed the Virtual Gallery and the Birzeit University Museum between 2005 and 2010. Tamari is actively involved in the promotion of art and culture in Palestine and serves as advisor and member to numerous institutions and cultural boards. She served as jury member for YAYA (Young Artists Award organized by the Abdel Muhsin Qattan Foundation) and AFAC (Arab Foundation for Art and Culture).
As artist she specializes in ceramic sculpture and conceptual art and has exhibited widely since 1974 in solo and collective shows in Palestine, the Arab World, Europe, the UK, Japan and the USA. A recent book on her career “Intimate Reflections: The Art of Vera Tamari” was published in 2021 by the A.M. Qattan Foundation.