Aromas (Homage to Saliba Khamis) in Haifa

Abed Abdi is an artist and educator, working in the fields of printmaking, painting, and sculpture. He earned his Master of Fine Arts in Germany, where he specialized in graphic art and murals. He served as a co-curator for the outdoor exhibitions of the Holiday of Holidays festival. Abdi has received numerous awards and honors.

He was born in the Wadi al-Salib neighborhood. In 1948, his family was expelled from Haifa. After spending years in refugee camps, the family returned to the city. His works explore themes of migration, displacement, and the concept of homeland.

In the piece located at 3 Haddad Street, two aluminum figures appear inside a perforated steel frame painted light blue. The faces of the figures do not reveal their identity. The work is a tribute to Saliba Khamis (1922–1994), a leader and activist in the local Communist Party. Khamis was the editor-in-chief of the newspaper Al-Ittihad, and a colleague of Abdi, who worked as an illustrator for the paper. The newspaper’s office was located in the Wadi neighborhood, not far from the artwork’s site.

The title of the work, Perfumes, refers to Abdi’s memories of working at the newspaper when the smells of cooking from neighboring homes would drift through the windows and distract Khamis from his editorial duties. The open box in the lower left corner of the frame is designed to hold a scented candle.

The use of perforated steel plays with the interplay between what is visible and what is hidden. It is impossible to say with certainty whether the two figures represent Khamis or the neighboring women cooking by the windows. The Arabic text on the clothing is not entirely legible, nor are the facial expressions clearly defined. This preoccupation with revealing the hidden accompanies both Abdi’s work and life, with a focus on researching the history of the region in general and Haifa in particular. This artwork reveals yet another layer of the city’s local history.

In creating these figures, Abdi merges geometric elements to reflect the connection he sees between homes and people. The light blue shadows of the frame echo throughout his depictions of Haifa, as though the sea’s color has flowed into the homes lining its shore.

The project was created during the Holiday of Holidays event.

Wadi Nisnas is one of the most picturesque – and oldest – of the neighbourhoods of Haifa. Its narrow and winding streets, falling away down a steep hill towards the sea, are home to a mainly Arab population and are testimony to the warm and friendly relations existing in this, the most pluralistic of Israeli cities, where Arabs and Jews live together in close proximity.

The Wadi Nisnas Hanuka-Christmas-Ramadan Festival is a social, cultural and artistic expression of these good relations. This “Holiday of Holidays” takes several forms: art exhibitions, music and dance performances, sale of arts and crafts and encounters between artists and the public.

The open air sculptures shown here were part of the Wadi Nisnas Festival of 1997. Together and separately, they relate to an idea combining social and urban interest, the goal of which was to attract visitors to the Wadi Nisnas area.

The artistic interaction in this project stems from the basic character of the place, with its human texture, its urban components, and the social issues dealt with at nearby Beit Hagefen, a centre of Jewish-Arab culture. The art encounter, which was comprised of many elements, material and spiritual, enabled the participating artists to present their works in an open framework, making perceptible the removal of the barrier between what is seen as elitist art and populist art, between intellectual statement and ethnic artistic expression, between “noble” and “poor” materials, between centre and periphery, and between contemporary and traditional approaches. The aim was to create a meeting-point which in the viewers eye will connect into a colourful weave where, without the warp, the weft will have nothing to hold on to.

There was no unifying title for this project. It contained personal artistic expressions appropriate to the place where they were displayed, and linked one to another with the naturalness of their flow, and with something of the theatrical about it, in how they were displayed on roofs, walls, alleys, passageways and other unconventional spaces.

source: Beit Hagefen

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