The medium of pencil drawing has a special relationship with the temporal dimension. Think, for example, of the laborious, highly detailed drawings made by students in the margins of their notebooks during lessons to pass time. It is a minimal medium. Oil paints, in comparison, are expensive and require treatment, as well as ancillary materials and brushes and oil and turpentine and rags etc.—hence oil painting requires time and space for itself. Pencil, on the other hand, can be used casually. It is immediate, cheap, yet rich, and has an infinite range of expression. It is a proletarian medium. Ultimately, it is wood. Samah Shihadi (b. 1987, Sha'ab; lives and works in Haifa) draws in pencil, and her works manifest the pencil's range of qualities.
The genre of realism, or rather "realism," maintains a unique relationship with the Orient and with Orientalism. This is the classic assertion made by Linda Nochlin, for example, that the use of realistic language in Orientalist painting is intended to demonstrate the superiority of Western representation, hence perhaps the supremacy of the Western gaze and maybe even a monopoly claim to the Western gaze and the creation of a relationship between a Western subject with a gaze and an oriental object, doomed to be the object of the Western gaze that depicts, explores, categorizes, names, and evaluates it. Edward Said formulated Orientalism as the way in which the West uses the Orient to define itself: we are intelligent, they are fanciful, we are masculine, they are feminine, etc. Realism, thus, is the use of a medium of truth to produce a falsity, whose purpose is to conquer, dispossess, rob, and oppress the represented. Shihadi liberates realism from Orientalism. She uses it to portray a truth unmediated by the ideology of the master. She draws only what's there: a wall, a building, a bush, landscape.
A key image in 18th- and 19th-century European art, the ruin is the image of yearning for a lost world, the image of enchantment with that which was once glorious and is no more. It is an image of vanitas. Pretensions of the past deflated by time. It is a symbol of the Enlightenment, which pits culture against nature. And it is also a romantic image of an ancient, medieval, gothic, haunted world, dominated by emotion and magic. Israeli art often explored images of ruins, from Gilad Efrat and the ruins of Tel Sheva, through Yitzhak Livneh, to Larry Abramson; Shihadi returns the ruins to a concrete rather than metaphorical discourse: these are the houses of specific people.
This is also her way with metaphors: the sabra, which the Zionists ascribed to themselves, and the native Arabs ascribed to themselves, itself being an immigrant from South America; the olive branch, which symbolized the peace intentions of the Zionist enterprise, and originated in the story of Noah's ark, where it signified the end of the flood; the same tree which for the Arab farmers symbolized steadfastness, resistance, tenacious clinging to the land (sumud) (therefore became a constant object for attacks on the part of Jewish settlers)— this tree reverts to being specific in the realistic drawing, and ceases to be a metaphor. I believe this is the reason why Shihadi likes the fragment, the close-up. She does not seek to endow the thing with a broad symbolic dimension; she regards it as a specific, concrete detail in essence.
In Shihadi's drawings, a braid is woven from three strands: from the medium of the pencil, the language of realism, and the choice of images. All are mobilized to liberate the drawn subject from its historical-philosophical-cultural baggage and observe the simplicity of its existence. Sink into it. Let time pass while working and observing. Give it room to be something before it becomes a sign in the conflictual power fields. Perhaps, there is nothing more political than liberating images from the language of the master, a liberation that allows them to finally make their voices heard.
