Amer transforms the dress into a fragile archive of absence, reflecting women’s lives shaped by displacement and occupation.
A wedding dress hangs in the corner of a room, but there is no mannequin inside it. The dress is – of course – white. Sleeveless. A vail, also white, partially covers it. It hangs just where the head of the bride should be. But this dress has no bride.
Far from being “just” a dress, on a closer look, you can see that tens of little sculpted glass pieces are sewn on the fabric. Can something as joyful and linked to such a positive imagery like an immaculate, beautiful wedding dress become the symbol for a world of postponed happiness, where the right to a thoughtless existence in the sign of love is systematically denied? “This work – explains artist Nawal Amer – is based on the story of Palestinian wedding dresses, which began in 1948 and will continue as long as the occupation persists”.
WOMANHOOD FOR PALESTINIAN ARTIST NAWAL AMER
Born and raised in Jerusalem, Amer is a glass artist. Through her works, she tries to make her voice heard – by focusing on the apparently ordinary, daily details of Palestinians’ lives in the West Bank. The dress, her dress, is the latest piece in her production and is showcased at the Palestinian Art Court Al Hoash, a non-profit cultural arts organization established in 2004 in Jerusalem. It is also the result of months of work, carried out through an artistic residency with Eitar collective – which “aims to break the cultural isolation imposed on Jerusalem and to contribute to the formation of a rich Palestinian artistic community in the city”. Nawal’s artpiece, titled شفافية الأبيض ,The Transparency of White, is part of the collective exhibition بقايا الحضور , Remains of a presence, featuring eight multidisciplinary women artists.
A COLLECTIVE MEMORY SEWN INTO GLASS
In Nawal’s words, her piece is “a vessel for a collective memory burdened by loss and incompleteness”. The work was born from a simple, almost natural idea, combined with a strong urgency to bring women at the center of her practice: “The wedding dress – she explains – is something really important for each girl, especially since the war of 1948, and I wanted to make something that touched the women themselves – how it is easy and how it is difficult to be a woman”.
STORIES HELD IN FRAGILE DETAILS
Each small glass piece represents a woman’s own story: “The swirls in the glass are not arbitrary, but deliberate marks, to mirror every woman”. Stories of love, but also of loss, of the marriages that took place and those that were supposed to be but didn’t happen, bonds that resisted the Israeli Occupation and bonds that were undone by it: “Each woman has her own story that differs from the others. Some of them didn’t have their wedding because they had to migrate. Some of them didn’t have it because they died in the war or their husbands died”. These may look like unfortunate, unlikely, even tragic coincidences to the European gaze, but each and every palestinian family has a story like this to tell. Once again, Amer digs into the daily suffering – the simplicity of what is systematically refused, the suffering that becomes a daily reality when you are living under occupation.
But it’s not just about the loss either. The brides, even those whose marriages never took place, are very much present in the work. Just like in her previous work Beirna Amer, a house full of flowers, presented last year at The Venice Glass Week, in Venice, Italy, absence and presence are intimately intertwined. “We made the dress of my size – Amer explains – and it is empty, to create a feeling of absence, but I also put something inside it to create a presence – at the same time, there is a girl inside the dress, and there is no one”. Thus, the dress itself becomes “a witness to an absent bride, and to a homeland trying to repair its memory piece by piece, just as glass is sewn with cloth, in a continuous attempt to keep the memory alive despite its difficulty”.
FRAGILE MEMORY, RESILIENT BEAUTY
In this context, the glass pieces are “conceptual structures that mirror Palestinian memory itself: fragile, cohesive, and prone to cracking”. A continuous attempt to reconstruct what has been broken. And the threads that hold the fabric and the glass together, become “a point of connection between pain and beauty”.
The work “also evokes grandmothers’ tales of brides forced to conceal their dresses beneath black abayas, making the dress a symbol of prolonged waiting, postponed to an uncertain future; a time when the body, the moment, and the right to joy are absent”. Generations of Palestinian women come together, becoming present and visible in the swirls of Nawal Amer’s glass sculptures. On the backrung of an untouched symbol of joy, their suffering appears, clear and simple as day through The Transparency of White.
LINK
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