Jane Frere
Nakba Project: Return of the Soul

February 2009

Artist’s biography
After training in theatre design at Central St Martin’s College of Art and Design, Scottish artist Jane Frere completed her postgraduate studies at the Slade School of Art in London, where she was awarded the Leslie Hurry prize. She has worked as a theatrical set and costume designer in the UK and in Greece. As designer and producer, she first worked with Edinburgh doyen Richard Demarco before becoming an international theatre producer and manager. Over successive years she brought a number of award-winning companies to the UK and festivals worldwide. Best remembered is internationally renowned Teatr Biuro Podrozy whose acclaimed performance Carmen Funebre went on to be performed in over 45 countries. On a number of occasions she worked in Iran, and in 2003 she produced the Edinburgh Fringe show The Mute Who Was Dreamed by the Tehran-based Theatre Bazi. Crossing and integrating disciplines, Jane’s current artistic work is experimental and uses a variety of media including sculpture, sound and film. She became immersed in the theme of the Palestinian exodus – Al Nakbah – in 2004, leading to her first video installation in 2005, which was presented alongside performances by the Ramallah-based Al Kasabah Theatre during the Maski Festival in Poland in November 2006.

Return of The Soul was first opened in Al Hoash Gallery, Jerusalem in May 2008 before the Edinburgh Art Festival; it subsequently went to Shams Theatre, Beirut and Darat Al Funun where she opened alongside leading contemporary artist Mona Hatoum.

Nakba Project: Return of the Soul
The project was devised as a means of exploring the historic events of 1948 when 750,000 Palestinians were driven into exile to become the longest suffering refugee population, whose numbers have grown to 4.5 million. The installation, Return of the Soul, was conceived as a means to extend the artist’s work to involve Palestinians themselves in the process of creating the components of a sculpture and multi-media artwork that addresses displacement, and offers an expression of their collective sense of injustice and loss, as well as asserting their right to a national heritage. The project grew out of earlier experimental video work by Jane Frere shown in Poland in 2006, and evolved as she was awarded a British Council-supported residency with the Al Hoash Gallery, East Jerusalem; this enabled an international programme of workshops to be developed in collaboration with Palestinian artists and others from refugee camps across the region, supported by a wide variety of organizations, chiefly the Welfare Association, the Red Crescent and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.

The Installation
This has several components:

  • A large scale sculpture made up of a multitude of suspended wax figures
  • Personal testimonies providing authenticated ‘identities’ for the figures and recorded on three meter long scrolls of paper presented between Perspex strips
  • Voices forming a sound sculpture reciting the names of the hometowns and villages of the refugees
  • Optional experimental video illustrating original developmental stage – ‘tank art’

Suspended wax figures
Over seven thousand wire, paper, wax figures are suspended in the air on a raked angle across the space. Using clear nylon filament, the figures are hung in a mathematical formula, large figures approximately 29 cm in front recede in scale to 0.5 cm, creating an impression through heightened perspective of an infinite exodus. The wax surface reveals little specific detail, its anonymity reflecting the often-lost identity of a person who has been uprooted. However when observed closely the viewer can see different groupings of figures; young, old, some carrying bundles, some bearing children, etc. representing a displaced people in a perpetual state of suspension. The relationship of the scale between spectator and the minute wax figure is important. Spectators are able to walk around the installation and at a certain point to pass underneath.

Hanging testimonies
Three-meter long scrolls of paper bearing the imprint of personal testimonies relating to the moment of exile are suspended vertically between handing Perspex strips, creating a “forest” of words. The testimonies are installed in a separate space complementing the figures and bear witness to the identities representing those forced to flee from their homeland in 1948.

Sound Installation
Fragmented layered voices, edited from a series of filmed interviews conducted by the artist, are played in the space surrounding the hanging testimonies.

The project process and methodology
In September 2007 the artist traveled to Palestine to take up an artist’s residency at the Palestinian Art Court - al Hash, in East Jerusalem.  The gallery aims to become the national repository of Palestinian art. In developing the project programme, the artist traveled throughout the region visiting in refugee camps in the West Bank, Jordan and Lebanon, to conduct a series of training workshops.

An important element of the process involved collecting the testimonies of individual Nakbah exiles, via the younger generation. In order to gather these oral testimonies, the artist chose to stay with refugee families, whilst conducting a series of six day workshops with young professional artists and refugees.  During the initial phase the artists were trained in the figure making methodology, in order to either give further workshops in the camps or assist the artist.

Artist's statement
The wax figures represent those people who were displaced by An Nakbah (The Catastrophe) of 1947-1948, when up to 750,000 people of the indigenous population of historic Palestine had to flee, yielding their homeland to the newly formed state of Israel. The starting point for the project was a reference in a film entitled Soraida: A woman from Palestine in which a Palestinian women describes a dream where she sees figures in the distance hanging like clothes on a laundry line. She asks: "The poor people, why are they doing this to them?" and relates the response: "Because they are Palestinians, this way they remain suspended, unable to touch either heaven or earth."

Figures being suspended within a space became an integral part of my project and vision, which began as an experimental video work before growing into a large- scale installation. Briefly sharing the lives of a people under occupation, and at times in appalling circumstances with refugee families in camps, I have come to understand how human beings suffer not only physical deprivation, but also psychological humiliation caught in a state of perpetual suspense. Increasingly my work as an artist is moving towards addressing the universal plight of many human beings already displaced or whose lives face major disruption by circumstances beyond their personal control, whether by conflict or by the new environmental threat of as climate change.

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