The story begins with a woman waking to a burning sensation in her skin. She scrubs her face and notices a new wrinkle in the center of her forehead. She thinks, “Long ago this was a field of flowers / But then, they turned it into a desert / And mysterious flowers began to bloom.” The woman collects soil samples and reports of contamination: the gradual disappearance of ravens and crows, a boy born with a face half red. She visits dozens of villages, disposable cameras in tow. “She thought about how she could capture the damage of something invisible,” the story reads. “She felt exhausted by the sheer effort of having to measure and record.”
Inas Halabi’s exhibition, “To a Returning Cloud,” at Brookline Arts Center includes six of the images that this unnamed woman might have taken, hung in a row opposite the gallery’s large windows. Each photograph shows a quotidian landscape in the West Bank, tinted deep red: rows of houses on a horizon, a dented metal traffic barrier, and a fiery patch of cacti. The streaks and bubbles of light that bloom across their surfaces indicate that the color was not added in digital post production but rather with colored gel sheets. The number of sheets used while creating each image corresponds to the site’s recorded quantity of Cesium-137, a radioactive isotope produced by nuclear reactors and weapons. An image of a horse in Hebron is mediated by three gel sheets layered over the photo, corresponding to 7.9 Bq (becquerels) of Cs-137. A bucolic image of hills and trees in Khirbet al-Taybeh uses ten filters, corresponding to radiation levels over three times as high. A red gel is applied to the gallery’s windows, framing both the institution and its surroundings as irradiated space.
Halabi’s visual investigation of these sites is based on the work of Khalil Thabayneh, a nuclear physicist who teaches at Hebron University. He appears in her 2019–2020 video, which, along with the prints, is titled We Have Always Known the Wind’s Direction. The work opens with a conversation between Halabi and Thabayneh, discussing the possible burial of nuclear waste in Palestine. As the film moves across a succession of landscapes, Halabi and Thabayneh place red filters over the camera, creating images much like the ones shown in the gallery. This intervention makes palpable an invisible malignancy, a submerged yet toxic threat to life and land. But at the same time, Halabi’s film also maintains a note of skepticism about the utility of such a project. “People are such fools! These colors only confirm that we’re going to die,” Thabayneh says over an extended shot of a bird gliding on currents of air.
Halabi’s filmmaking practice draws on fûkeiron, or “landscape theory,” a concept developed by the critic Masao Matsuda, the filmmaker Masao Adachi, and other leftist figures in 1960s Japan. Eschewing spectacular images of protest and upheaval, they believed that quotidian shots of homogenous landscapes were better suited to contemporary structures of control and alienation. As Gabrielle Domb suggests in her thoughtful curatorial essay, Halabi is similarly engaged in “the question of what forms of representation might be adequate to capture nonpunctual violence—violence which, insofar as it does not occur in singular events and enacts its effects in a way that is bound up with repetition, is resistant to traditional narrative structure.” Her work might be compared to that of other contemporary artists, such as Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Oraib Toukan, who take a reflexive approach to portraying the atmospheric and pervasive effects of state violence.
It is fitting that the other works in Halabi’s exhibition are hardly visual at all. Four small booklets, collectively titled Lions Warn of Futures Present (2017), exist somewhere between testimony and fable. The story that opens this review is drawn from one of them; another relates the story of entire trucks filled with nuclear waste that were seen driving into the mountains and thought to be buried whole, never to be seen again. These works are joined by Hopscotch (The Center of the Sun’s Radiance) (2021), a project that examines the history of uranium production across two sites: the Shinkolobwe mine in Congo and the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga (UMHK) refinery in Olen, Belgium.
The project’s centerpiece is an imageless film: the monitor shows only a black background and white text, which transcribes and situates a series of interviews and field recordings. The audio includes work songs from the mines, interviews with workers and managers, snippets of songs over the radio, and the persistent hum of air conditioning and industrial production. The full piece is almost two hours long, and I found it hard to linger with for long in the gallery. I watched (or rather, read and listened to) the entirety of the film on a train from New York to Providence and later learned it was originally made to be experienced in transit, in relation to the viewer’s own shifting landscapes. It streams continuously on a designated website, accessible via QR code in the gallery. Both the Shinkolobwe mine and the UMHK refinery have been closed for decades, but it is hard not to think of the recent escalation of violence in Congo, motivated in part by the scramble for the country’s cobalt, coltan, and gold—yet another persistence of colonialism into the present.
In an essay published last December titled “Seeing Genocide,” Ariella Aïsha Azoulay points out the misleading character of the “before” and “after” images of Gaza that circulated online in the first weeks of the Israeli assault. These images underscored the sheer destructive force of the bombing campaign, but “this before-and-after should not mislead us, since Israeli genocidal violence is also inscribed in the ‘before’ image,” she writes. The project of replacement relies as much on strategies of attenuation and attrition as it does on outright acts of murder and expulsion. As Palestinian legal scholar Rabea Eghbariah has recently argued, the foundational force of the Nakba (referring, in common usage, to the 1948 expulsion of Palestinians from their homes) might be better understood as a structure and a continuous process rather than a rupture.1
Halabi’s exhibition contains no overt images of violence; the damage it portrays is structural, dispersed to the scale of the cellular, the underground, and the atmospheric. On the most superficial level, this strategy exists in uneasy tension with the present, when the indiscriminate force and naked brutality of Israeli violence is broadcast twenty-four seven for anyone who cares to look. As of this writing, over seventy percent of Gaza’s housing has been damaged or destroyed, along with countless universities, hospitals, schools, galleries, and businesses.2 The United Nations has estimated it will take years to clear the over 42 million tons of rubble that cover the Strip—a task that will be complicated by the presence of asbestos, unexploded munitions, and the unrecovered remains of the dead. In a recent article featuring photographs as well as 3D visualizations of the rubble, Bloomberg asserts that this is “enough rubble to fill a line of dump trucks stretching from New York to Singapore.”3 This fanciful metaphor is hardly adequate to the reality of what is happening, the sheer scale of this loss and the sheer depth of this grief. Here, too, images fail us.
1. Eghbariah, Rabea. “The ‘Harvard Law Review’ Refused to Run This Piece About Genocide in Gaza.” The Nation, November 22, 2023.
2. Beaule, Victoria. “70% of Schools in Gaza Destroyed or Damaged During Israel-Hamas War, ABC News Analysis Finds.” ABC News, September 11, 2024.
3. Hodali, Fadwa; Akram, Fares; Kao, Jason; Haque, Jennah; Lin, Jeremy C. F. “Gaza Reduced to 42 Million Tonnes of Rubble. What Will It Take to Rebuild?” Bloomberg, August 15, 2024.
“Inas Halabi: To a Returning Cloud” is on view at Brookline Arts Center through November 2, 2024
