Bashar Hroub, by Simon Morley

Being a Palestinian artist must be a mixed blessing. On the one hand, you have

a readymade subject matter, as well as a public eager to know about it. On the

other, it is difficult to escape the reductiveness that this clarity brings with it.

Everything you do ends up being a political commentary that risks squeezing

out any other intentions you might have.

Bashar Hroub is attempting to find a way beyond this impasse. He aims to

universalize his cultural predicament, which is why he roots his work in his

own subjectivity rather than in a detached analysis of the cultural conditions in

which he finds himself. Furthermore, he is looking for succinct visual metaphors

which can carry a depth of meaning.

In the Here and Now striking series of works in the current exhibition, we see

him in various places wearing a mirrored cube on his head. While we might

want to indentify this as a statement about the invisibility of the Palestinians

in the current situation, it seems far too limited to stop there, especially as the

artist appears to be in England some of the time. The image of a reflective

head is much more poignant than a single reading suggests, and all kinds of

questions about visibility and invisibility, our relationship to the environment

or our cultural context also push themselves forward. Hroub is currently in the

UK studying for his MA in Fine Art, for example, so he is experiencing firsthand

the sense of displacement that comes from being in a strange place. But

of course the cube also speaks of much deeper kinds of mirroring, even of

the narcissism that Freud identified as a central aspect of the human psyche.

But whose narcissism, exactly? The artist’s, or the viewers who prefer to insert

their own meanings into the space opened up by the artist? Perhaps it is this

ambiguity that makes these works so effective.

Simon Morley

March 2010

Simon Morley is an artist and writer.