Breathing the air: the back story

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Aser al Saqqa's extraordinary struggle to bring art from Gaza to London

I can see the scene now. Friends laughing in the kitchen preparing the food for a barbeque; chickens pecking around outside in the garden while the green-eyed ginger cat laps up the plate of yoghurt. The gate to the lush garden squeaks open as more friends noisily pile in and greet each other with hugs. This is my home, where my roots are, where my friends are. This is Gaza. Don’t believe me? It’s all on Facebook.

On a Friday in September 2010, my friend, old colleague and a leading Palestinian sculptor, Fayez Sersawi, had arranged a barbeque at his house on the outskirts of Gaza City to welcome me home and to meet old friends from our days working together at the Ministry of Culture in Gaza 1993–8. Among the lunch guests were a playwright, photographers, video artists, painters and poets. Majed Shala, a quiet unassuming artist and photographer was one of them. He had spent the last ten years of his life teaching art to teenagers and had co-founded a new gallery in Gaza called Shababeek, Windows.

Fayez challenged me over lunch: ‘How come it’s taken you so long to think about working with us in Gaza again. Did you forget us in London?’ He was right. Since I had left Gaza in 1998, the work produced by Gaza’s irrepressible artists had transformed from a body of work largely in the service of the Palestinian nationalist cause – doves, flags, symbols of resistance and defiance – to a much more diverse canon of explorations on the themes of identity, freedom and the pains and pleasures of life under and beyond Israeli occupation.

I returned to London from my three-week visit to Gaza invigorated and thrilled by the range and quality of artwork being produced there. The level of creative experimentation alongside the severe legacy of the continuing political violence was striking. Destroyed studios and a shortage of materials had not held artists back, but forced a new determination to assert their humanity.

I brought back with me a selection of some of the work I had seen in Gaza, including five of Majed Shala’s paintings exhibited at the Arab British Centre this week (23–27 May). With no suitable carry case for art to be had in Gaza, I invented my own from recycled cardboard, carrying it with me through the border to Egypt, through the Sinai and up to Cairo. Despite their improvised container, the paintings arrived safely in London.  So when, in January 2011, the Arab British Centre confirmed they wanted the complete series, nine paintings in all, I was delighted and started to plan how I might get the remaining four out of Gaza in time for the exhibition.

The Arab Spring took some people by surprise. Obama now acknowledges that breathing the air of freedom is a legitimate aspiration for the people of the Middle East. But we Gazans have always known that people have the power to change the status quo. Why else struggle?

So the irony was not lost on me that, in January and February, as the people of Egypt found their voice and dignity, the border between Gaza and Egypt became even more impregnable. The only way to leave Gaza for the vast majority of its one and a half million inhabitants (mostly banned from travelling for the last four years) was now closed to non-Palestinians too. The route out of Gaza for my final four paintings for the ‘Breathing the Air’ Exhibition was blocked.

Gazans have a reputation for their back-up plans: the ability to switch from plan A to plan B or C at the drop of a hat. In that spirit I had three options in mind. Plan A was for an artist friend to transport the final four paintings with him to Paris in February 2011, in good time for the exhibition. But when the border with Egypt was suddenly re-opened in late February he had to leave Gaza in a hurry without the paintings.

So I moved on to Plan B. Our friends from A–Z Theatre were going to Gaza in April 2011, it was cutting it a bit fine, but the idea was they could bring the paintings back to the UK when they came home. But Plan B was scuppered when they were turned back at the border with Egypt, so couldn’t get intoGaza.

Time was running out as I switched to Plan C. A friend of the artist was going from Gaza to Lebanon. He offered to bring the precious cargo out of Gaza with him, deliver it in Cairo to our A–Z Theatre friends, who could store it safely in their luggage and have it in London in time for the opening. Three days before A–Z’s homeward flight I heard news our ‘courier’ couldn’t get out of Gaza – pilgrims wishing to travel from Gaza to Saudi were being given priority.

So now I was stuck, my three plans had failed and I needed a Plan D – but what? It was now 17 April and we had one month until the exhibition opened in London. What could I do?

After deliberation, I thought that if the ‘courier’ could eventually get out with the paintings perhaps I could fly out to collect them from Cairo. But maybe he wouldn’t get out. A difficult question was posed: would I ever consider paying for these four vital paintings to come through the tunnels?

At midnight on the day before our friends from A-Z Theatre were due to come home I received a text: ‘We have the paintings’. The handover had taken place near Cairo airport just before midnight. The relief was wonderful! The paintings arrived at Heathrow on Wednesday 20 April.

The Irish dramatist, George Bernard Shaw, said ‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man’.