This article curatorially examines the artwork of Gaza-born, Rahat-based artist Khader Oshah and through the analysis of his artworks, discusses social, economic, political and environmental perspectives of contemporary Arab Bedouin society. Oshah’s artwork resonates with the recent shift that the Arab Bedouin Negev communities are experiencing – from an age-old agrarian existence in villages to an urban lifestyle in newly constructed, government-initiated cities. The conceptualisation of the artwork articulates a new form of Arab Bedouin contemporaneity that is unique in its combination of tradition and progress.

Introduction
The artwork of Gaza-born (1966) Khader Oshah, currently living in the Arab Bedouin city of Rahat[1] in the Negev desert, sparks a discussion on how art and curating – posited at the intersection of politics, culture and institutional policy – may “right wrongs”[2] in terms of representation of Arab Bedouin art. Oshah, like many other Arab Bedouin, comes from a line of tribes that have inhabited the Middle East and North Africa for centuries across present-day Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman, Yemen, Jordan, Syria, Israel/Palestine, Egypt, Algeria and Morocco. The term ‘Bedouin’ evolved from ‘badawi’ – used to describe the nomadic or semi-nomadic agrarian people who inhabited the desert.[3] Since the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948 and quite intensively since the 1970s, the indigenous Arab Bedouin community – one third of the southern Negev desert population[4] – have undergone processes of urbanisation, in many cases through forceful acts of demolishing the villages and dwellings of rural communities. The centralisation of Negev Arab Bedouin communities and the urbanisation process that has been put into motion by the Israeli governments have created a forced move from rural life to an assimilated urban lifestyle in seven government-initiated cities that have been constructed from the late 1970s onwards in southern Israel/Palestine.

The article firstly conducts a curatorial investigation into a series of portraits of the young urban generation of Rahat in the Negev desert created by Oshah, and asks in what way they convey the social, economic, political and environmental impacts of the assimilation to urbanism that has recently been imposed on Arab Bedouin society. Secondly, the article conceptualises the knowledge gained from the examination of the portrait series to articulate a unique form of Arab Bedouin contemporaneity – one that is in incongruence with the widespread globalised and Westernised 21^st-century contemporary art and culture.

Oshah’s portrait series raises to the surface a unique negotiation that the Arab Bedouin urbanite generation manage between a forced Westernised and globalised lifestyle that they have been interpolated into in the last decades, and the predominant societal sentiment that they propagate and the previous generations embrace, which strives to preserve the traditional Arab Bedouin agrarian existence. The negotiation between progress and traditionalism that the young urbanite generation manages pronounces a form of Arab Bedouin secular traditionality that, although it is rooted in Islamic belief and religiosity, defies the oppressive religious authority that restricts individualist behaviour. The traditionalist sentiment of the older generations is the focal point of the main exhibition in the chief cultural institution in the world responsible for the collection, preservation and communication of traditions and visual and material culture of Arab Bedouin society. The curatorial programming of the Joe Alon Center / Museum of Bedouin Culture demonstrates the complexity involved in challenging the dominating authoritarian perspective that is rooted in an ethnographic principle of exhibiting artifacts. The Negev-based institution’s artifacts mainly have their origins in the Sinai desert (where quite different traditions than the Negev Arab Bedouin communities are practised) and date back hundreds of years. Narrating ancient Arab Bedouin culture and traditions, the museum’s permanent exhibition includes traditional clothes, household utensils, carpets, tools and jewellery, as well as historical photographs and archaeological findings. The museum’s outreach program centres on 95% groups of school children and youth from the Jewish communities and 5% Arab Bedouin groups. On the museum’s grounds lies a hospitality tent where coffee and pita bread are made and served by the local Arab Bedouin community. The staff of the museum are predominately Jewish Israeli, while a slight Arab Bedouin presence is found on the instruction team. Alongside its main historical collection, the museum dedicates a small space to contemporary Negev Arab Bedouin art. But by focusing on a collection of artifacts from the Arab Bedouin past, the museum avoids addressing the contemporary tension between autonomy and traditionalism and contemporaneity as it arises amongst the young generation of Arab Bedouin urbanites. In summary, the main museum in the world dedicated to Arab Bedouin art and culture communicates it through the prism of  an authoritarian perspective , avoiding a discussion on the trajectory of Westernisation and capitalism that the younger generation of the Arab Bedouin cities pursue. The development of curatorial methods that represent Arab Bedouin art of the Negev in local and international institutions is central to my dissertation-based book Keeping the Edges Open: Towards a Curatorial Horizon in the Negev Desert.[5] The book stemmed from my position as the curator of an international residency program and a contemporary art centre that I founded in Arad in the Negev desert. During my post in Arad, I faced a lacuna in the representation of Arab Bedouin art in Negev and in international institutions. I approached the omission of Arab Bedouin art in local and international cultural institutions by initially investigating the historical circumstances that had brought about the absence of Arab Bedouin contemporary art, especially in the context of the global trend in the art world of the last decades whereby indigenous and other cultures dominate the curatorial programming of many Western institutions and mega-exhibitions in Europe and the US.[6] I subsequently considered the lacuna in cultural representation of Arab Bedouin contemporary art resulting from the common curatorial approach assumed by Negev art institutions that aligns with a Westernised and globalised perspective and therefore does not curatorially address current trends in Arab Bedouin society. In continuation of my previous research on Negev art and curating, the article curatorially investigates Oshah’s portrait series to conceive a form of presentness typical of Arab Bedouin society that presents how the negotiation between a globalised, Westernised perspective and a traditional rural, secular Islamic sentiment are the beating heart of the emerging urban generation. The nature of Arab Bedouins that were born and/or grew up in government-initiated cities in the Negev transpires through the paintings’ formal characteristics (painting style, composition and palette) and through the painted subjects’ attire (expressions, hair, fashion and setting). Curatorial investigation into the painting series of Oshah creates a typology of the emerging generation of Arab Bedouin urbanism. The unique status of knowledges acquired through their curatorial investigation documents social trends in real time. Demonstrating how identity is an entity that is in constant negotiation and in flux, Oshah’s portraits create a body of knowledge that is valuable in its contemporaneity, signifying the flux of identity in Arab Bedouin society as enduring a dramatic shift from a rural to an urban lifestyle. Oshah’s painted subjects highlight identity as a dynamic framework in which individuals negotiate their individualism in accordance with their traditional upbringing. Maintaining that the younger generation in traditional societies feels the need to create an updated sense of belonging, Oshah’s portrait series creates an up-to-date body of knowledge that may be used in other contexts where the notion of civic belonging in urban environments in relation to traditional, indigenous societies is discussed.

Methods
The curatorial method applied in the analysis of Oshah’s portrait series makes beneficial the gaps between academic, institutionalised research methods, and concepts and ideas that arise from the paintings and their subjects. Sadiya Hartman, an American academic, writer and first-generation US-born woman of black decent, addresses the question of the sense of agency in terms of writing the narrative of minorities in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals.[7] Hartman introduces the idea of “critical fabulation” as a research methodology that combines historical and archival knowledge with critical theory and fictional narrative.[8] She writes: “Every historian of the multitude, the dispossessed, the subaltern, and the enslaved is forced to grapple with the power and authority of the archive and the limits it sets on what can be known, whose perspective matters, and who is endowed with the gravity and authority of historical actor.”[9] Hartman refuses to write the narrative of African American women through the academic, institutionalised, historical perspective. Rather, she develops a writing style that is frequently considered fiction in academic circles; an artistic method that leaves room for a powerful imaginative empathy towards her characters to arise.[10] Following Hartman, the method applied in the curatorial investigation of Oshah’s portrait series combines the art-historical perspective of the analysis of portraiture with concepts and ideas arising from the painted subjects that create fragmented and partial storied accounts of recent trends in contemporary Arab Bedouin society.

Problematics
The complexity of my position as a Jewish, Ashkenazi Israeli art professional with a Western upbringing problematises the artistic investigation into Oshah’s portrait series. My positionality brings with it some inherited differences that need to be acknowledged and challenged. The inheritance of a Western, academic vantage point – replete with its own traditions and orthodoxies – preserves an outsider perspective on Arab Bedouin culture and society. The democratic impulse that is at the heart of the impetus of this article to “right wrongs” of the structural injustice of the cultural representation of Arab Bedouin society stems from years-long activities in promoting the rights of minorities in Israel/Palestine. In the capacity of my current work in a philanthropic organisation for leadership in the Negev, in which I facilitate leadership amongst Arab Bedouin communities, I react to the historical imbalances in the representation of Negev communities. My leadership role stems from the comprehension I arrived at during my previous position as the curator of the international residency program and the contemporary art centre in Arad, that the lacuna in the representation of contemporary Arab Bedouin art derives from a Westernised artistic and curatorial approach – a lacuna that is most surprising in terms of museums that are dedicated to non-Western cultures such as the Joe Alon Center / Museum of Bedouin Culture.

Questions at stake
The article questions the capacity of the curatorial to “right wrongs” in terms of historical injustice in artistic representation. It raises the need to develop a systematic method of the curatorial that to not only “right wrongs” in terms of historical misrepresentation, but also articulates the current moment in indigeneity where a dramatic shift from agrarian to urban existence takes place. The article devises a form of presentness in Arab Bedouin society that is at the intersection between progress and traditionality – a contemporaneity that does not fully align with the logic of Western Eurocentricity. The curatorial investigation of Oshah’s artwork is rooted in questioning how artistic, curatorial and pedagogical developments in the Negev have assumed a form of presentness that diverges from the Eurocentric Westernism. As founder and curator of the Arad Contemporary Art Center in the Negev desert, I questioned the Westernised curatorial code of conduct that I had been accustomed to in my upbringing, which requires a form of the curatorial that deals with the collection, preservation and exhibition of traditional artifacts such as oral knowledge, traditions and rituals. My work as a staff member at the Mandel Center for Leadership in the Negev and as a lecturer at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design raises questions regarding pedagogical means that address the plurality and diversity of Negev populations: Jewish, Arab Bedouin, Orthodox, religious and secular voices. How can this plurality be nurtured as a fundamental condition for creating a sustainable community fabric? Working in the Negev with diverse communities requires a mode of attentiveness that builds confidence in the ability to express the uniqueness of cultures – to create a curatorial environment for collaborative development of content that is natural to the community, while simultaneously reflecting cross-population values of mutual respect, equality, diversity and pluralism.

Khader Oshah: Painter of Everyday Urban Life in Rahat
Historians and archaeologists have conducted research on ancient portraits to amass a wide range of knowledges typifying ancient societies. Although portraiture has been the focal point in historical academic research, it was only late in the 20th century that portraiture was recognised by art historians as a valuable artistic genre. In his well-known article “Mona Lisa” (1973), the British art historian Kenneth Clark asserted that an artwork whose subject is the “truthful likeness of an individual” is worth artistic examination. Clark writes: “Some of the greatest pictures ever painted have been portraits – we need think only of Titian, Rembrandt and Velasquez to accept that statement; and yet the aesthetic theory of the last seventy years runs entirely counter to the fact of experience that a truthful likeness of an individual can be a great work of art.”[11] Two decades later, the American academic and writer Richard Brilliant asserted that the significance of the artistic investigation of portraiture as a particular genre is that it is especially sensitive to changes in the nature of the individual in a particular society. Analysing a broad range of portraits from antiquity to the 20th century, Brilliant argued that: “Portraits reflect social realities. Their imagery combines the conventions of behavior and appearance appropriate to the members of a society at a particular time, as defined by categories of age, gender (…), social and civic status and class. The synthetic study of portraiture requires some sensitivity to the social implications of its representational modes, to the documentary value of art works as aspects of social history, and to the subtle interaction between social and artistic conventions.”[12] Brilliant’s pronouncement that portraiture creates knowledges that allow one to learn about social realities, conventions of behaviour and appearance in certain societies is relevant to the investigation of Oshah’s portraits. Valuable knowledges regarding changes in lifestyle, social structures, religious beliefs and a sense of belonging to society arises from the portraits’ imagery and their subjects’ appearance.

I express what is in my heart in all the ways available to me and address personal, social, and political issues. For me, this is a mirror that reflects the tragedies I experienced at different periods in my life. I am influenced by the environment and bring to my works the memory of my Palestinian family that was expelled and part of which still lives in Gaza. The distance, the longing, the siege on Gaza, life in Israel – all components of my identity are partners in the drive to express them in artistic creation. I address all these issues and criticize both Palestinian and Israeli society, because as an artist I am committed to my inner voice regardless of society’s reactions.[13]

On the one hand, Arab Bedouin take part in Israeli society, including enlisting in the army, etc. On the other hand, many Arab Bedouin families were expelled from the new Israeli state in 1948, and the Islamic belief system creates an affinity with Palestinian identity. How did Oshah choose his subjects, and in what way do they resonate a wavering Israeli/Palestinian identity? What messages are being conveyed through his choices? How do the portraits reflect the embedded conflict of identification that is at the root of Arab Bedouin society? These questions shed light on what issues may arise from the paintings that can teach us about the first urban generation of Rahat. Addressing them, one may propagate a sense of presentness that encapsulates the dramatic shift in lifestyle in recent decades, and to link it to a much broader schism – that of the sense of belonging to a society amongst the Arab Bedouin community. The sense of belonging to society can be traced back to the ancient Roman Empire – especially to the periphery of the Roman Empire where a conflict of identity took place between the affinity with the local identity (for example Egypt) and the sense of belonging to Roman society. In the ancient Roman Empire, the concept of the freedom of an individual was linked to one’s class and status. If you were born to the class of slaves, you lived according to what the ruling class ascribed to you. If you were affiliated with the ruling class, your rights were clear. In a society which prescribed individuals the extent of freedom according to their class, the concept of ‘civitas’ i.e., the sense of belonging to a society, was meaningful. The Roman sense of ‘civitas’ linked all citizens together – whether serfs or rulers. One of the first unique documentations of this dual sense of belonging to society arises from the artistic investigation of the Fayum portraits (100–300 A.D) – an important source of knowledge on the Roman-era Egypt. The investigation of the Fayum portraits reveals how Roman citizenship and a sense of belonging to society operated in a peripheral society, distant from its cultural and administrative centre. Historians have used the research of the portraits to trace the position certain individuals attained within the ancestor cult and thus to create a historical database of the Roman era in Egyptian society. Nevertheless, an artistic investigation into the Fayum portraits contributes unique knowledges to the research into Roman-era Egypt that differs from other sources: the analysis of their imagery demonstrates how Egyptian citizens of the Roman Empire assumed Roman visual codes to assert their participation in the imperial civitas, while preserving their traditional Egyptian rituals. Examination of the Fayum portraits establishes how their subjects – the affluent elite who had the means to commission the portraits that would later be used in their burial – adopted metropolitan Roman fashions including togas, tunics and jewellery; woman’s hairstyles that follow imperial court trends; men with carefully groomed beards such as those adorned in Rome to emphasise their affinity with Roman culture. The inquiry into the portraits reveals a unique type of ‘civitas’ – that which has integrated Roman and Egyptian cultural features. While the portraits employed Greco-Roman artistic techniques that emphasised individual likeness and personality, their function remained rooted in ancient Egyptian funerary practices. The portraits were created to fulfil the traditional Egyptian religious requirement to preserve the deceased’s physical appearance for their journey into the afterlife. This combination reveals that acquiring Roman ‘civitas’ did not demand the complete rejection of ancestral traditions, but instead permitted a blending of cultures, whereby Roman civic identity could coincide with local, traditional beliefs and practices.

One may sense the sense of Roman ‘civitas’ and the blending of cultures in Roman-era Egypt in Oshah’s portrait series. One may also recognise this sense of a mixture of styles in Oshah’s subjects: young men wearing baseball T-shirts; Hawaii-printed blouses; women with uncovered heads wearing Western attire with vegetal and ornamental backgrounds. Like Roman-era Egypt, Oshah’s subjects portray a mixed identity in which the notion of ‘civitas’ accommodates Arab Bedouin traditions and at the same time follows the trajectory of globalised and Westernised cultures. The sense of a layered notion of ‘civitas’ appears with a metal strip engraved with the artist’s ID number, which is fixed to the paintings’ wooden substrate – a gesture that seems to express Oshah’s questioned sense of belonging to Israeli society. One may link the gesture of attaching his ID number to each of his portraits, engraved upon a metal strip, to the fact that Oshah’s Israeli identity is quite volatile. His family was expelled in 1948 from the newly founded Israeli state to the Gaza Strip where he was born. Only later in life, when Oshah married a Bedouin woman from Rahat and was allowed to exit Gaza and return to Israel, was he given an Israeli ID number. One may link the attachment of the engraved ID number to the portraits to a sense of syndication of his feeling of belonging to a society that is responsible for his family’s traumatic history. By fixing his recently acquired identity to the paintings on a metal strip, he reminds us of the Gaza Strip and his family’s precarious history.

Portrait of the Boy Eutyches, encaustic on wood,
38x19 cm.,  A.D. 100–150, collection of Metropolitan Museum, NY

 

Khader Oshah, Self portrait, oil on wood plank, 47x69 cm., 2006

 

Not only is the notion of ‘civitas’ questionable in contemporary Arab Bedouin society but also its affinity to religious belief is undergoing many shifts and changes. While the presence of Islamic religious institutions is strengthening in many Arab Bedouin cities, it seems that with the assimilation to a globalised and Westernised culture, the younger generation is developing an urban, secular mode of Islam. Although neither the Qur’an nor Islamic tradition explicitly warns against figural representation in art but rather idolatry and the worship of images, by painting portraits the artist clearly defies the conservative Islamic sentiment in Arab Bedouin society that prohibits the depiction of humans in art and culture. But Oshah chooses not only to defy the Islamic prohibition on depicting human figures, but also to contrast traditional Islamic imagery in his paintings with a secular, Westernised and globalised aesthetic. Ornaments, calligraphy and geometric patterns that appear in the background of select portraits and that frequently adorn architectural elements such as walls and ceiling panels in Islamic buildings, are juxtaposed with painted subject’s Western attire. For example, the ornamental and vegetal pattern in the background of Self-Portrait (2006) contrasts with the striped Western outfit of the painted subject, creating a unique aesthetic out of the two incompatible styles. While the subject of Samar (2008), blends with its background her skin tone fusing with her dress that, in turn mixes with the ornamental pattern in the background, creating a tapestry-like composition that emphasises the dominance of Islamic imagery in Arab Bedouin culture, her bashful facial expression raises questions regarding the religious regulation of women’s tradition attire. Her glance sideways conveys her disquiet from the unconventional setting. Wearing unconventional dress, with loose hair and deprived of a headdress, the painting’s subject conveys a form of secularity that is quite new to the Arab Bedouin street. Self-Portrait and Samar express how the urbanites of Arab Beoduin cities manage the tensions between a form of Islamic  secularity and a traditional lifestyle.

 

Wall Panel with Geometric Interlace, polychrome marble, mosaic, 118.1x59.7, 15th century, collection of Metropolitan Museum

 

Khader Oshah, Self portrait, oil on wood plank, 47x69 cm, 2006

Khader Oshah, Samar, oil on wood plank, 60x75 cm, 2008

 

One can also find in Oshah’s choice to paint his portraits on wood substrate an expression of his subjects’ and his own assimilation to an urban lifestyle. This recalls the Western artistic methods of ‘objet trouvé’ practised by the Surrealists, which challenged traditional ideas about art by appropriating urban remains into artworks. In Oshah’s case, the appropriation of slabs of used wood draws the viewer’s attention to the new Arab Bedouin urban environment of Rahat. The use of wood as the portrait’s substrate raises awareness of the fact that the contemporary use, transformation and codification of materials in the urban Arab Bedouin sphere have changed immensely with the recent process of centralisation and modernisation in Arab Bedouin society. This contrasts with an agrarian lifestyle in which the use of materials stemmed from long-term engagement with the natural environment and preserved communal knowledge of creation. Present-day Arab Bedouin cities are flooded with commercial, mass-produced materials. By choosing to portray his subjects on mass-produced slabs of wood, Oshah reminds us that together with an accelerated assimilation to an urban lifestyle, Arab Bedouin society is experiencing a loss of a long-term engagement with the natural environment. The portraits express the sadness involved in the break in the chain of tradition but also the excitement that accompanies the newly forming urban environment. They allow one to contemplate on how the new urban environment influences bodies, movements, physicality, concepts and ideas and how through art and curating, one may begin to sketch out the portrait of a young, urban, secular, individualist generation of Arab Bedouin in the Negev.

Khader Oshah, Lenah, oil on wood plank, 55x98 cm, 2006

Khader Oshah, Khadeja, oil on wood plank, 70x100 cm, 2008

Khader Oshah, Khadeja, oil on wood plank, 70x100 cm, 2008

 

Conclusion
Oshah records the young generation of Arab Bedouin that populate the government-initiated cities of the Negev desert, focusing on how they manage the tensions between an individualist, secular urban lifestyle and their parents’ and grandparents’ agrarian and traditional past. The curatorial investigation into Oshah’s portrait series amasses a body of knowledge that is unique to art and curating regarding the first Arab Bedouin urbanite generation in the Negev desert and how they meet the standards of modernisation while preserving traditions and knowledges of the Arab Bedouin indigenous community. The analysis of the portrayed subjects’ appearance – fashion, hairstyle, expression and setting creates up-to-date knowledges that conveys the vivacity and exuberance of the young Arab Bedouin urban generation. The analysis of the portrait series demonstrates how Arab Bedouin youngsters negotiate issues such as religiosity, urbanism, traditionalism, history of rural and agrarian existence, traumatic expulsion from Israeli society, blended identity, amalgamated Israeli/Palestinian identification and more.  In conclusion, Oshah’s portrait series has a dual significance – it not only reflects the young generation of Arab Bedouin that populate the government-initiated cities, but also holds the power to generate knowledge regarding a form of Arab Bedouin contemporaneity in the Negev desert cities that has not yet been fully articulated in academic literature.

Hadas Kedar is a curator, educator and researcher whose work explores how cultural encounters generate new ways of understanding identity and place. With experience spanning from the desert peripheries of the Negev to international art institutions, Kedar examines how artistic practices reveal and unsettle both visible and invisible borders. Their forthcoming curatorial project ‘Learning from Deserts’ (ZKU, Berlin) brings desert community knowledge to European audiences, highlighting indigenous approaches to climate instability. Through teaching, research and exhibitions, Kedar investigates art of the peripheries while fostering cross-cultural dialogue and community engagement. Kedar is the founder and curator of a residency programme and an art centre in the Negev desert, and has led initiatives that emphasise the transformative potential of cultural work in our interconnected, multicultural world.