In the Service of Art
Fair Trade in the Service of Art
Sharon Lior
Published in Challenge magazine no. 97 - May-June 2006
Sindyanna of Galilee is known for marketing Palestinian products, such as olive oil and baskets, according to the principle of a fair return to producers ("fair trade"). We have recently taken on a new project supporting Palestinian artists who live and work in Israel. The aim is to help them gain exposure by including reproductions of their work with the items we market.
It is no secret that artists have a hard time getting by. How much harder when they are Arabs, living among people for whom the art of survival must come first, overshadowing all else! The lack of a developed consciousness for art in Arab society is evident in the utter absence of museums and the very few galleries, which teeter on the edge.
In the view of Rania Akel, a young artist taking part in our project, the problem starts in school. "Every artist who tries teaching art in school soon despairs and leaves. In addition to low budgeting, a shortage of classrooms and few instruction hours, the schoolteacher-artist is worn down by a daily battle for existence. Art is always the first subject to be cut when difficulties arise."
Akel is active in providing after-school art classes for the children of her village, Kufr Qara. This is their first - and for many it will be their only - opportunity to engage in making art. "I had the chance to study," says Akel, "and now I have a strong desire to communicate my knowledge to the society I came out of."
Akel is one of five Arab artists in the project so far. For each we chose a single work and formatted it as a postcard. On the back appear the artist's name and some details about the piece.
We include one postcard of the five in a gift package of Sindyanna's olive-oil soap, which is made in the West Bank city of Nablus. Each package contains four bars, enriched with natural substances from our area: lemon, honey, milk and Dead Sea mud. On the outside is a photograph of all five postcards. The idea is to encourage the purchaser to buy more in order to achieve the complete collection. One can also buy the whole set of five, as some have already.
The first artist we turned to, in starting this project, was Ahmed Canaan. He is among the founders of a gallery in Tamra, a village of Galilee. Canaan helped us contact other artists, including young Fatma Abu-Romi, also from Tamra. Abu-Romi does realistic portraits in oil, mostly of people in the village. The subjects look straight at the viewer, sometimes partly hiding behind a veil or other covering.
Another Tamra artist in our group is Salakh Hijazi, 64 years old. Hijazi draws Tamra as he remembers it from 1953. In his work one can sense the pastoral atmosphere, when the village occupied only one hill. Beside it appear the first shacks of the refugees from 1948.
The fifth artist in the group is Izis Rizek of Nazareth, a graduate of Haifa University in art and philosophy. A recurrent motif in her work is the raising of hands in various poses, signifying joy, anger, victory, a plea for help, and more. The situation of her subjects is often ambiguous, inviting interpretation.
The Palestinian artists in Israel have a thirst for exposure, and Sindyanna wants to help them gain it. We intend to make contact with more of them and create more postcards. We also want to make a calendar consisting of all the cards. We welcome additional ideas for marketing the artists' works.
Sindyanna believes that "fair trade" has to do with more than fair payment to producers. We seek to invest in the areas others neglect. By means of the project with Palestinian artists, we link the fair-trade concept to people who want to develop their society. That is how we see our task: to provide the best quality, while swinging the balance toward justice.