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Artists and Allies of Hebron, a Berlin- and West Bank-based organization and NGO, which is due to exhibit at the Venice Biennale next year, has today launched a new online magazine featuring Palestinian artists. Described as “a tool for resistance,” Union Magazine aims to use art to “celebrate and salute the Palestinian people,” says the Berlin-based Jewish artist Adam Broomberg, who founded Artists and Allies of Hebron in 2020 with the Palestinian activist Issa Amro.
“It’s a way of not being silent within the art world while not screaming some political agenda,” Broomberg says, noting that the title of the publication represents the “idea of being self-organized at a time when our simple rights as humans and fellow art workers are so undermined.”
The first four artists to be interviewed include Hazem Harb, whose work incorporates historical artifacts such as archival images, map fragments, coins, and pressed plants. In this way, his art is a “bridge between the past and present,” the artist says in the magazine. Harb collages these elements together, often into diptychs, which he says serve as a metaphor for his life in the UAE. As he puts it: “As someone living in exile, my journey through adulthood is constantly unfolding between worlds, with my mind anchored in a homeland that I cannot physically inhabit.”
Earlier this year, the Belgian journalist and photographer Barbara Debeuckelaere traveled to Hebron in the West Bank, the only place in which Israeli settlers are living in the heart of a Palestinian city. There, she photographed the women of Tel Rumeida, a particularly traditional neighborhood built on top of and around an archaeological mound referred to as “Tel Hebron” by Israelis. For her project, OMM, which means mother in Arabic, Debeuckelaere photographed the women’s surroundings and then handed the camera to them to capture themselves and their homes as they wished.
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