Shawa’s multi-media pieces have spanned four decades. As someone who has a close proximity to her native Palestine’s politics, her analysis and documentation of events there is at the core of her work. For that, it is in strength that she is known for her “uncompromising documentation of events of today’s Middle East.”
In this show, entitled “The Other Side of Paradise,” portraying high levels of desperation and violence, evidence of this description greets the guest as soon as they walk into the gallery from the quiet Holborn road in Central London.
The exhibition displays contradictions in style expressing ironies of occupation and resistance. Shawa, a self-described 21st century artist, brings together strong influences of pop art with Iranian miniature and Mughal nature paintings. “I am very influenced by TV, movies and advertisements,” she says while expressing her frustrated wonder at the passive acceptance of violent video games.
Drones are everywhere — hyper colored, they float in a haze of clouds of musky pink gasses. The word “WHAAM,” written in big yellow block letters, channel Lichtenstein’s influence in a piece entitled “Gaza Sky.” Right next to it, the drones are disrupting the quiet of the pelicans, crows, waterfalls and other symbols of thriving life in the piece entitled “Birds of Paradise.” The bold mix of colors, imagery and titles express a friction between anger and the use of style to accentuate the focus on the issues within these works.
The most heart-rending subject in this series, appearing over and over again on the Gallery walls, is the failed terrorist: A woman whose suicide bomb didn’t, and, after three attempts, wouldn't detonate. Shawa learned of her while watching the 2007 documentary “Cult of the Suicide Bomber.” After three years of research, Shawa produced a series reflecting her thoughts on the complexities of the issue of women, occupation and the suicide bomb as resistance.
“It is important to draw attention to Palestine. Different artists do it in different ways. No one wants to mention suicide bombers, male or female. It is a taboo issue. But as a woman, I am interested in the position of women in the Arab world,” she said.
The suffering in the bomber’s face appears repeatedly. In each painting, we see her with different levels of opaqueness, at different rates of repetition. In “Unleashed,” her distressed expression stands behind the inserted cartoon of a muscular Catwoman in body tight black latex and a glittery pink belt, questioning ideas on heroism. In “Scream,” her face appears and reappears 10 times, gradually zooming in on her mouth, open in tormented cry, each time in a different shade of forceful, heated colors.
Shawa’s views on this are not simple, and this shows in the agitating works. Shawa questions the ideas that lead to the decision to detonate one’s self as a form of resistance.
“We deal with very basic ways of resistance and we are not going anywhere from there. It’s pathetic, Israel kills us with drones and M16’s; they pollute the water. What do we do? Either blow ourselves up or use rockets, which are totally ineffective and do more damage to ourselves than to them. I am all for destroying our enemy, but we need to do it more intelligently, which we are not,” she explained.
Shawa’s research on female suicide bombers in particular made these issues even more complex. “The majority appear to have been, in some way, pushed by their families because they may have offended or dishonored them. Rather than honor killings, these women are pushed to be suicide bombers. But we can’t isolate the ‘honor’ issues from the rest; we are under a very brutal occupation. We are not dealing with people who are colonizing us and leaving us alone; they are slowly eroding us and removing us from our land. They have done so successfully in greater parts of the country,” she added.
This erosion is evident in the degree of violence against women in Gaza, which as Shawa notes, has increased. “Men feel emasculated. They find the softest target, women, and beat them or send them to blow themselves up.”
She added: “I am motivated by anguish, loss, occupation and myriad of issues related to being occupied. There is also the manipulation of the mind, the idea that they will achieve martyrdom, which is sad and desperate”— a point she stresses through the disparate title of “Birds of Paradise” and the colorful drones within the piece.
The CCTV footage looping in the corner of the Gallery space was the trigger that set off this entire series. After seeing it in the documentary, Shawa bought the rights from the producers with the aim of creating works based on it. It shows the bomber as she removes the layers of her clothing having been singled out by the checkpoint soldiers in her attempt to cross the Gaza border to Israel. The video cuts from colored, to color tinted, to snow. As we watch her get more and more angry, we see her still trying to detonate herself, but failing. Rather than an explosion, we see the climax of anguish. Now she is truly trapped; it is unclear whether her entrapment is in being alive, the threat of life imprisonment or the possibility of death.
“This is not only about women and their position, and the point that they can only reach equality if they die, but also what motivates things that cause the despair in us. Yes, there is abuse of women, but there is more abuse by occupation of us as people," explains Shawa.