BY DAVID WHETSTONE
Chronicle Live

So often when the recent past is fractured and confusing, the job of making sense of everything lies in the shared territory of the distant past.

This is apparent in the latest exhibition by an international artist at Baltic.

Jumana Emil Abboud, a Palestinian, was born in the city of Shefa-’Amr, Galilee, a region of northern Israel which is home to a large Arab population who are mostly Moslem but also Christian and Druze.

Jumana, whose family are Catholics, lived there until she was eight. Then her family – her parents and their five daughters – emigrated to Canada.

“We lived near Toronto for 13 years and that’s where, for me, it started,” explained Jumana ahead of the exhibition’s weekend opening.

“I was trying to connect to a new place and also to remember the first place I’d called home.

“In fact, I was having to rethink my connection to my homeland.”

Jumana’s father, she said, had a good reason for taking his family abroad. “It was his ambition and his desire to find a better home for his children.”

But then, when Jumana was 20, he died and the family upped sticks and moved back to Galilee.

“It was a collective decision,” said the artist whose sense of dislocation was exacerbated by the return.

By this time, though, she had already embarked on an art education.

“I never really understood why there was this pull to return but that’s what I started to engage with in my art practice… this powerful connection but also why I felt so fragmented and cut off.”

Jumana picked up the threads of her art studies in Jerusalem – “the only place that was open to me” – while her family settled back into the family home which her grandfather and an aunt had occupied during their absence.

She saw the “warmth and beauty” of the country. “But it was so hard because suddenly there were questions I was forced to think about, such as my gender and my choices in life and the political situation.

“In Canada I didn’t have to think about things like that. Suddenly I had to think about my Palestinian/Israeli identity or at least be aware of it.

“There’s probably pressure wherever you are but the pressure on a Palestinian artist is to produce political art in order to express your identity.

“I felt that expectation on myself and my peers but I didn’t want to just do things to fulfil other people’s expectations.”

As an example of the sudden cultural change she was experiencing as an adult, she recalled how single women in Galilee weren’t expected to leave home unless it was for education or marriage.

“This was 25 years ago and it has changed now,” she said.

“But for me there weren’t really any role models. I’m 45 and there aren’t really any female Palestinian artists older than me.

“There are plenty of younger ones and I’m teaching now so I hope I can give out plenty of personal energy.”

Jumana’s exhibition at Baltic shows how she dealt with her early upheavals and concerns.

She turned for inspiration to the fairytales she had heard as a child and which had deep roots in her culture.

And she found that versions of these stories existed in other cultures. By focusing on them she felt she could reach people across various divides.

This idea lies behind what we see at Baltic.

On the face of it, it’s a sweet and simple show. There are no wordy explanations but you get a strong sense of something that goes beyond modern hostilities.

There’s a series of drawings called The Ballad of the Lady Who Lives Behind Trees.

The pictures show magical creatures, human and animal, in magical landscapes.

Jumana said she dug deep into her own memory but also used a book of Palestinian folk tales called Speak, Bird, Speak Again.

“These stories come from an oral tradition so this book became my bible.”

The drawings were done in a range of different media but principally gouache and pastel. “They are my great loves.”

A few of the drawings were done on green envelopes “to suggest distance as I was asking questions of the home I had left behind and was returning to”.

On one wall a video-poem called I Feel Nothing is showing. You have to put on a headset to hear the words but it was inspired by a Palestinian folktale called The Handless Maiden and filmed at locations in Palestine and the UK.

But the main event is the new 15-minute video installation called Hide Your Water from the Sun, showing on three screens in an adjacent room.

Beautiful and relaxing, it shows grass and trees and trickling water. Butterflies flutter and goats amble. The only moment of tension is when dogs bark at a tethered horse.

This installation, explained Jumana, was the first fruit of a serious work-in-progress.

With cinematographer Issa Freij, she used a study made in 1920 by a researcher, Dr Tawfiq Canaan, into Palestinian springs and wells that were believed to be haunted by demons.

The film shows placid and unscary places.

“But it is slightly political,” said Jumana. “Because of the separation wall that’s being built (keeping Israelis and Palestinians apart) and illegal settlements that are right up against certain Palestinian towns, they have built new roads which make some of these places inaccessible.

“We set out to find these water sources but I was very keen to not show the roads or the illegal settlements.”

In part, perhaps, the air of tranquillity is an illusion and not because of ancient demons.

A second ‘chapter’ of this video piece is being shown in London at the Kunstraum gallery from May 14.

Jumana, whose work invites a rethink about a tangled part of the world, was delighted to be having her first UK solo exhibition at Baltic.

“I feel the happiest I’ve ever been in an exhibition and every time I say that I feel emotional,” she said. “I want to cry tears of joy.”

Her exhibition runs in Baltic’s Level 2 gallery until October 2.