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| State of Palestine#1, c-print on Diasec, diameter 125 cm, 2011©Khaled Jarrar, Galerie Polaris, Paris |
Khaled Jarrar is a young Palestinian artist born and currently living in Ramallah. He completed his education in Interior Design at the Palestine Polytechnic University in 1996, and then he graduated from the International Academy of Art-Palestine with a BA in Visual Art in 2011. He entered the world of photography in 2004, his first exhibition "At the Checkpoint” in 2007 has been placed in full view of the Israeli soldiers at Howarra & Qalandia checkpoint. Jarrar works with photography, video, and performance. He participated in several solo and group shows. Since 2008, Jarrar made a number of video artworks and short films.
For this exhibition at the Galerie Polaris, which will be his first one-man show in a gallery, four videos, photographs and an installation will be shown: Passage is a video from 2010, in which Palestinian men and women cross the wall between Jerusalem and the West bank through a clandestine tunnel. In the second video, Wet Suit, 2011, we follow a man in a scuba-diving outfit in the streets of Ramallah. The video emphasizes the Ubuesque side of an individual who will not find a single drop of water in the city.
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| State of Palestine # 2,c-print on Diasec, 100x118,5cm,2012 ©Khaled Jarrar, Galerie Polaris, Paris |
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| State of Palestine # 2,c-print on Diasec, 100x118,5cm,2012 ©Khaled Jarrar, Galerie Polaris , Paris |
The installation Docile Soldier takes the relationship between the photographer and his subject to the extreme. In this case, the photographer is a Captain officer (Khaled Jarrar is himself a Captain of the Presidential Palestinian Guard) who takes close portraits of his unit, as they become soldiers. The video and the portraits are both displayed in the gallery.
The video I. Soldier is an observation of other soldiers from filmed from a roof as going through their daily exercises that have become a routine practice in their life. They are subjugated to a well-planned ideological process that aims to unite them intellectually and physically. Khaled Jarrar observed and re-observed them, filming until he penetrated into the individuality of each soldier. The sister work to this video is a series of four acrylic panels each one painted in the spectrum of the four colours associated with camouflage. This painting series is also called I. Soldier.
Extracts of the performance Live and Work in Palestine will also be shown such as: The State of Palestine stamp project. Khaled Jarrar compensates for the absence of a Palestinian State by designing both a passport stamp and a postal stamp with the “State of Palestine” symbol – a sun-bird -. This project is a proposal against the division of Palestine. This symbolic project uses art in an open confrontation with reality, and asks the audience to participate in the experience, while passports are stamped with the new seal. Jarrar didn’t just take pictures of people with their stamped passports, but he also collects reports of their own experiences at the Israeli border through the project’s Facebook page. Khaled Jarrar’s works unfolds in a series of questions that call for more questions.
Khaled Jarrar : Docile soldier March 17 – April 28
Galerie Polaris 15 rue des Arquebusiers
75003 Paris
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