Bashir
Makhoul
Dr
Bashir Makhoul is a Palestinian artist born in 1963 in Galilee,
Israel. He has been based in the United Kingdom for the past twelve
years. He has exhibited his work widely both in Britain and internationally,
including the Haywood Gallery, London, The Herzilya Museum, Israel,
Jordan National Museum, NCA Gallery, Lahore, Pakistan, The Liverpool
Biennial, the Florence Biennial, UTS Gallery, Sydney, Australia
and many more. He is currently Head of the Department of Art and
Design at the University of Luton UK. |
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'Points
of View' 1998 Photographic printed wallpaper |
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The focus of Bashir
Makhoul’s work is located within the Universal Themes of
Events, the Abstract and the Environment. Personal, family, national
and international events have impacted on the content and form
of his explorations. His installation work, ‘Points of View’,
recreates a sense of the impact of many explosions, and the repetition
of bullet holes in plaster become almost an abstract pattern of
repeated shapes and motifs with which Bashir communicates the
terror and hostility that living in such an environment must provoke.
The effect of the work is one of utter stillness. The echo of
shell blast, the moment when the dust has settled. The wait for
more firing.
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To
spend time with Bashir’s work is to live in a suspended
moment of reflection. We are taken right inside the detail, the
magnified image, rotated, reflected, repeated. Once inside the
detail, we speculate on the meaning, reflecting on the images
as a kind of thought focus, a mandala, enabling a clarity of vision
or sensibility to emerge. Inside the dense black bullet hole that
is a reality for so many people across the world, into the delicate
beauty of the soil that is the soil of his home, upon the fragile
imprint of human skin, reminding us of the impermanent, fleeting
nature of life. And yet amongst the impermanence, a sense of solidity,
eternity.
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'Points
of View'(detail)
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‘To
see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour’
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The
words of William Blake conjure that sense of time and timelessness
that is so much a preoccupation of Bashir’s work. His work
involves the viewer personally. We shudder at the bullet holes,
then empathise and yearn to make good the damage.
Change can be positive, that sense of ‘still’ in relation
to Bashir’s work is the sense of things evolving, humanity
affected and grown resilient to events and experiences, the capacity
to survive and live on, still searching, striving to make sense
of the world. Despite the ‘still sad music of humanity’,
the ‘still small voice’ continues to sing.
Links
Hold
http://www.utsgallery.uts.edu.au/exhibitions/past/2001/hold.php |
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