Aysha E. Arar
By Mohamed Amer Meziane and Anissa Touati
First and foremost, Aysha Arar's trajectory disrupts our conventional narratives of what an artist is. A thousand miles away from the romantic myth of a genius bestowed by God or nature upon a sanctified creator, Arar enters the art world as if breaking and entering. There's no conversion to a fantasized demiurgic function, no "revelation" when born Palestinian in Israel. Arar was propelled by the chance of a prosaic Google search towards an art school. Inspired by the power of singing, the voice is omnipresent through the smallest threads weaving the image. Whose voice? Hers, but also that of the Palestinian people, living "under incubation": silenced and forced to speak a language that is not their own. Arar undoubtedly practices an art of resistance to oppression. However, despite constant references to the figures of the hero and the Messiah, this art of survival does not manifest itself in the conventional forms of the "political." Far from any committed art, resistance is primarily the ability to breathe underwater by changing worlds and elements through the power of images and voice. Breathing underwater when one can no longer do so on land. Like Amphibia: a creature, part-human, part-animal, a being of submarines, it breathes and lives in worlds not accessible to the oppressive forces that claim the lands. Beyond the staging of a reclamation of land or dignity, it aims to transport us into another world on which no colonial or patriarchal force would have a grip.
