Fahed Halabi

Born in Majdal Shams, 1970. Lives and works in Tel Aviv-Jaffa.

Ala Farhat

Born in Buka'ata, 1977. Lives and works in Tel Aviv-Jaffa.

Fahed Halabi and Ala Farhat are Syrian artists whose joint artistic practice is based on their work in the past decade as construction workers, day laborers, and contractor workers. The video Working Day (2009) describes a workday in the building site of the stately Georgian Synagogue in Ashdod. The video artists, Halabi and Farhat, specialize in the construction of columns which follow the Ionic and Corinthian orders, in classical Greek or Roman style, reeding and fluting the columns. The new building, with the Star-of-David at the façade, is decorated with tall pillars, standing out as deviant against the backdrop of Ashdod's neighborhoods.

The camera oscillates between the carving work taking place on the scaffoldings surrounding the synagogue, and the conversation of the Palestinian construction workers taking place at its foot. The conversation centers on the story of a young worker of Gazan-Palestinian origin who arrived in the Israeli city of Or Yehuda as a young boy. With much sincerity he exposes the intricate politics of identity typifying his life with his Jewish friends, his Palestinian friends in Israel, and his childhood friends in Gaza, saying: "If I were in Gaza now, if I still lived there, I believe that there would only be a picture of me on the wall—a shahid (martyr)." Throughout the conversation he identifies with innocent people being hurt both in Sderot and in Gaza, among them his friends killed in the recent war in Gaza.

The builders' conversation employs a mixed slang blending Hebrew and Arabic, biographical exposure, class consciousness, and personal and political criticism. Together all these generate a complex identity of otherness, which includes an Arabic-Syrian identity on the northern Golan Heights, Palestinian identity in Israel, and Gazan-Palestinian identity, raising questions concerning alienation, identification, and yearning.

In Fahed Halabi's work Sheinkin-Melchett (2009), the artist is seen casting the concrete roof of a building on the corner of these two streets in central Tel Aviv. From the point of view on the rooftop, the city of Tel Aviv is exposed with its roofs, balconies, and new high-rise apartment buildings. The camera moves between the signs of advanced modernity and irreplaceable manual labor, focusing on the artist's hands holding a plastic pipe through which he pours the concrete. The motion of the pipe calls to mind a dance or alternatively, Jackson Pollock's expressive "action painting" technique used in his famous drip paintings. As a virtuoso artist, Halabi controls the cement flow, regulating it to fill the gaps, and the cement is smeared, pouring, dripping sensually on the surface of the roof as if it were a large-scale canvas. Halabi creates a painterly surface with gray monochromatic aesthetic alongside disillusioned, ironic class awareness.

Dance movements combined with ironic class consciousness are also evident in another video work by Halabi, To You with Love (2006), in which the artist, dressed as a builder, a tool belt around his waist, performs a belly dance to a song by Lebanese singer Nancy Ajram. During the dance Halabi takes off his shirt in a gesture reminiscent of Palestinian existential reality in the past decade, where many Palestinian men are forced to expose their bodies when crossing the checkpoints, getting on a bus, and as a routine procedure during encounters with Israeli security forces. In this work Halabi exposes an Arab-Oriental male body to Western eyes. He challenges both the stereotype regarding the Palestinian man as a security threat and a ticking clock, and the Orientalist stereotype of belly-dancing as a cheap dance performed by Eastern women. He dances sensually and with manifest pleasure with body movements that continue a long lasting tradition of Eastern-Arab dance.