Back with you after this short break

The most frequently used phrase on television and radio – “back with you after this short break” – floats across our soundscapes so frequently that we almost no longer hear it. Used by hosts to signal a brief intermission in regular programming, this sentence (and variations of it) implies a brief and patient wait before a return to business as usual.

In Arabic the expression is used much the same. However, the word ‘break’ or fasel (فاصل) has a double meaning depending on use – conveying a pause or interlude, or indeed a separation. By drawing on this expression in his exhibition, Khaled Hourani’s work signals a multitude of separations: a divorced landscape, a division of people, and more broadly – a break in “business as usual”.

This is most clear in the artist’s focus on the Separation (Apartheid) Wall – the clearest architecture of occupation, disruption, and division. The imagery of the wall and architectural elements of occupation in Hourani’s work are all drawn from images of Palestine published in the media. They are in this way representative of the ubiquitousness of these images, and the position of Palestine as the world’s most heartbreaking and long-standing testing ground for surveillance, occupation, incarceration, and the architecture of control.  These works generate another ‘break’ through the artist’s deliberate removal of the landscape from these images. Despite its deliberate omission by the artist, the landscape haunts these works, defining place by shaping the curve of the walls depicted. Put simply, the land persists.

People persist too. Using every (seemingly implausible) means to bypass, hurdle, climb and move beyond the wall. In these images, people (that is not soldiers), play. They wander, they climb, they sleep, persisting despite a disappearing landscape, and the continuous testing ground disruption that surrounds them. Moreover, these figures transform the architectural elements of the wall into ruins, as though floating relics of a period that appears to have passed. In this way Hourani’s works represent a different kind of ‘break’; a temporal recess, or a break in time.

As ruins, these architectural elements point not only to a sense of the past, but also of possible futures. These interaction of figures with these architectural elements create a sly humour characteristic of the artist’s work – one that defamiliarises the familiar, making strange the things we have come to see as normal and every day. Through this subtle humour, Hourani reminds us that the occupation is an interlude, and that Palestinians are hosts who “will be right back after this break”. Right back to land, place, and each other.

Chrisoula Lionis
Writer and cultural producer