Artist and scholar Samia Halaby will describe the research she did for her Kafr Qasem Massacre series, a special project that includes documentary drawings. Halaby will discuss how its aesthetic process and challenges differ from her approach to abstraction. The series is a unique project in her artistic oeuvre as a painter, and was done as a response to the attempted mass-media erasure of Palestinian culture and history.
Begun in 1999 under the encouragement of a vibrant daughter of Kafr Qasem, Halaby travelled to the Palestinian village with her young hostess and immediately became immersed in the trauma left by the 1956 massacre. In spite of the passage of 45 years, the emotional devastation of this horrific event left a permanent imprint on the life of the people. Kafr Qasem was a village given to Israel by the King of Jordan with the understanding that its residents would become Israeli citizens with democratic rights. Instead they experienced something very different.
17 March 2017
