ShareFrom awareness campaigns to photo exhibitions, Ghassan Hamadeh, a Jordanian artist of Palestinian origin, has dedicated his talent to highlighting the plight of the Palestinian people. “Being Palestinian put me in a position where I feel more responsible,” Hamadeh told Kuwait Times in an interview. “Artists must funnel their works through a political or social lens that resonates with them. Otherwise, they’re only someone with a canvas — just another number without direction or purpose.”
Driving down the Arabian Gulf Road over the past few months, it’s hard to miss one of Hamadeh’s most recent Palestine-centric works adorning billboards. The awareness campaign, which features a traditional keffiyeh wrapped around the word “WiyaKUm”, Arabic for “with you”, on a bright yellow background, has also spread like wildfire on social media. On Instagram, people have set their profile pictures to a photo with the iconic black and white scarf wrapped around their names written in Arabic. The multi-platform campaign is the brainchild of Hamadeh’s marketing and advertising agency.
The concept behind the campaign is powerful, yet straightforward. The word “Wiyakum” carries meanings of solidarity and kinship, characteristics for which the Kuwaiti people are known. The two other symbols accompanying the word were not random choices, either. The keffiyeh serves as an emblem of Palestinian identity, and the shaddah, one of the diacritics used with the Arabic alphabet to indicate a doubled consonant, emphasizes the importance of coming together for the Palestinian cause.
Hamadeh said it felt rewarding to see people across the world embracing the campaign. “I felt that I was doing something for my people who were being subjected to injustices and being murdered every day,” he said.
Preserving oral history
Hamadeh was born in Kuwait and has called it home all his life. He only visited Palestine once when he was six years old. “I remember the smallest details. I can still smell Palestine, the scent of the groves and the smell of the earth when farmers are turning the soil,” he said.
But his connection to the homeland remains strong, owing to stories he’s always heard from his 90-year-old mother. “Her memory of Palestine is so vivid. She tells us stories of the land, the traditions and customs, the names of things...” Hamadeh’s children see their heritage through their grandmother’s eyes. They also see their father creating art to honor Palestine, which he hopes deepens their attachment to the Palestinian cause.
In another recent work, Hamadeh channeled his love for photography into documenting stories of Palestinian resilience, similar to his mother’s. Over the course of four years, he got behind the camera to capture the tales of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. The project, called “White Memory”, serves as an oral and visual record of the early lives of 20 Palestinian men and women before they were forcibly displaced from Palestine. The black and white portraits were on display at the Contemporary Art Platform (CAP) accompanied by audio recordings of the refugees’ accounts, adding another layer to the narrative constructed by the photographs. Hamadeh plans to eventually collect these stories in a book.
“It’s important to document this oral history. The stories of these 20 people are a small part of the Palestinian village geographies and family histories carried with forcibly displaced Palestinians into the diaspora,” he said. “Our issue with the (Zionist entity) for example is that they’re stealing our culture. How do we prove that we’re the rightful owners of this culture? Through tatreez, dabke, photography ... any means of expression that prove our identity.”
Everything counts
Art has always been Hamadeh’s weapon of choice in the face of the Zionist entity. One of his first major works was a cover for Al-Watan newspaper commemorating the first anniversary of the first intifada, a yearslong series of protests, civil disobedience and riots that erupted in December 1987.
As one of few artists talented in airbrushing in Kuwait at the time, Hamadeh was asked to design and execute the newspaper cover page using the technique. Hamadeh visualized the Palestinian struggle using a bleeding map of Palestine. “If art wasn’t a form of resistance, Ghassan Kanafani wouldn’t have been assassinated,” he said. “You may be unable to fire a bullet or carry a rifle, but a word, photo, artistic work or melody can have the same effect of a bullet. Every little thing counts,” he said.
