Tarek at the Roundabout
By Ala Younis
Tarek Ala Duwwar installation: Tarek Al Ghoussein, Untitled 4, Untitled 2 (D II Series) and Untitled 11, Untitled 7 (C Series), Sadik Roundabout, Hawali, Kuwait. (April 12–May 1, 2011). Conceived and produced by MinRASY PROJECTS, part of a wider project in Kuwait of Art In Public Spaces (2011-2012).
In April 2011, Tarek Al-Ghoussein came to Kuwait and circled a roundabout in Hawalli, called Duwwar (1) Sadik. Tarek’s work was mounted on two billboards and two light boxes imposing themselves on the roundabout. Without the ability to gauge the public’s perception of his work, Tarek could see these works in dialogue with Kuwait, its inhabitants, and its history—a dialogue that would imprint itself in later works that Tarek would go on to produce (2). In one piece, the artist pulls a humongous blue tarp as though he were pulling the Gulf sea waters into the desert. Tarek produced Untitled (Self Portrait series) in 2002–3, appearing in a Kufiyah, drawing attention to the Palestinian residue in his identity. The series of photographs with the Kufiyah, popularized by Christie’s 2008 auction, was not among those works chosen for the intervention inKuwait; but the inherent Palestinian identity was.
The works were on display for two weeks as part of a series of public interventions initiated by MinRASY PROJECTS (3) to coincide with Kuwait’s50th year of independence and 20th year of liberation from the Iraqi Invasion. This intervention was titled Tarek Ala Duwwar (translated to “Tarek at the Roundabout,” or possibly allowing forTarek’s name to function as a verb, changing the statement to mean that someone or some event is passing by the roundabout). Each measuring4m x 14m, the specificity of the four images contextualized the need for the massive-scale landmark roundabout from the 1960s.
Two decades earlier, Hawalli was a microcosm of a state, if not a state within a state. Shopping centers, schools, clinics, banks, companies, commercial agencies, charities, cinemas, football fields, and PLO offices were present. Hawalli's heart was its roundabout, itself a reference to the British colonization of Palestine and an agent for Palestinians to arrive in Kuwait well before the events of the Nakba in 1948. Here, Palestinians lived and deliberated a unique model of an independent Palestinian society; one that was financially independent, despite living in exile, funding Palestinian liberation organizations through systemized cuts from salaries, while actively and endearingly co-building lively nationhood for Kuwaitis. The era between the 1950s and late 1980s shaped hope for both nations; but political events that began before August 1990 were abandoning this Palestinian Kuwaiti hybrid. Hopes of a return were consequently diminished, resulting in an oxymoronic state of existence. By 1991, 400,000 Palestinians were displaced again, this time from Kuwait.
Tarek Al-Ghoussein was born in Kuwait to Kuwaiti-nationalized Palestinian parents (a.k.a. Mkawwat). His displacement was not related to the invasion, but happened decades before when he moved out of Kuwait with his father, who was Kuwait's ambassador to the US and the United Nations and, later, to Japan. Since then, Tarek lived in many parts of the world but not in Kuwait. His return to Kuwait in 2011 was uncommon but not a coincidence. Just like the Kufiyah’s absence from these images, Palestinians in Kuwait were also absent from the latter’s celebratory fabric. However, Kuwait was present in the narrative of Palestinian Kuwaitis.
Staged in a desert, Tarek's photographs featured the artist engaging with elements shaped by movement, rarely apparent. Each of the four pictures meant something for MinRASY and thus was chosen carefully from existing works. One featured the artist engaging with an unfinished construction structure and a piece of green tarp flying over him. This choice may allude to the construction and development of the most monumental and visible works achieved by migrants in Kuwait's urban space. Standing there in the heart of Hawalli, as if the ruins were built by the Palestinian community, was an act against forgetting them and their fellow Gulf migrants who share the same work history. In Hawalli and other Gulf cities, numerous engineering, construction, and contracting companies were led by or employed Palestinians, of all levels of education, in the planning and executing of construction projects. As Kuwait was celebrating its independence, MinRASY ensured it was not too absent in this commemoration, even if just on the fringe, and thus saw the way in which involving artists such as Tarek Al-Ghoussein, a Palestinian-Kuwaiti who carried the complexity of this history in his work and biography into the public realm in Kuwait. Although Tarek had yet to have a conventional showing in Kuwait, this appearance was a start. There were no indications on Duwwar Sadik of the monumental intervention; just an email announcement circulated among MinRASY's network. It is interesting to note that this intervention captured the attention of the Economist publication. Due to their reporting, there was some interest in the intervention.
Tarek emerged from a set of histories, a series of entanglements. Displaced Palestinians diligently founding nationhood for other nations, generations developing a love for two or more homelands instead of one, and a particular consumerist and propagandist culture running in parallel. Palestinian artists who had lived significant amounts of their lives in Kuwait had not featured Kuwait in any way in their work. Yet, Tarek's calculations on identity addressed emerging variables. We can’t know if he was conscious of how it shaped a genre or a specimen essential to Palestinian and Kuwaiti histories. Tarek, in his photos, is lost, almost in search of perpetuity. Where would he end up living? Which images of a Palestinian were living inside him? What environment would eventually surround him?
The UAE was his adopted home; but Kuwaiti citizenship and GCC politics facilitated this adoption. These alienations, lines of questioning and anticipations could have represented many migrants' lives in the Gulf but appeared as crucial questions in the rarity of their representation in the region's art or when nationhood celebrations proved oblivious to the derangements that they were creating.
It is an empowering moment when kinship is identified through art imagery. The radical questions that prompted this reincarnation provide an example of their histories, too alive to be forgotten.
1. Duwwar is the Arabic word for roundabout.
2. See Tarek Al-Ghoussein’s K Files (2013) commissioned for Kuwait’s first national pavilion at the Venice Biennale, as part of the exhibition National Works, curated by Ala Younis, commissioned by National Council for Culture, Arts & Letters, Kuwait.
3. MinRASY is an acronym in Arabic, from Rana Sadik and Samer Younis and a double entendre, meaning “from my head”. MinRASY Projects, the concepts and practices of art activator Rana Sadik, include the installation of Khalil Rabah’s United States of Palestine Airlines at the Mishref Fairgrounds, Kuwait, the commission of Museum of Manufactured Response to Absence curated by Ala Younis, a Study for a Domiciled Gallery( 2015), and the Incomplete Personal Archives at Qalandiya International II (2016).