Fahed Halabi:
The Boy in the Blue Shirt

Fahed Halabi’s solo exhibition at the Umm al-Fahm Gallery is a milestone for the artist and
presents the current developments in his work.

Halabi was born in 1970 and grew up in
Majdal Shams. He immigrated to Europe around a decade ago and settled in Hamburg, Germany.

He has worked in various mediums over the years, primarily painting and video, and some of his works are considered iconic in the local art scene.
 

Like Halab's other exhibitions, the starting point of this one is related to the artis's identity – the identity he was born with and the identity with which he lives and travels through the world.

Halabi's insistence on returning to the topic of identity is stubborn and ironic in that it demonstrates both its own lack of origin and the idea of identity as a complex and paradoxical experience.

Consequently, the portrait is a central motif for Halabi and is ever-present in his work as an arena of political absurdities In his current exhibition, Halabi positions himself in relation to the theme of race – a concept
that is almost taboo in Israeli society but serves as a prominent identity marker in German society where he now lives. The starting point of the current exhibition is the realization of the arbitrary nature of race – in contrast with its pivotal and cruel importance in social power structures.

 

The boy in the blue shirt, after whom this exhibition is named, appears in one of the exhibited paintings. Halabi aims for the moment that we, the viewers, must describe him and differentiate him from other children depicted. Would we easily call him, “the boy with dark skin" ? Or would we prefer not to mention it, and rather describe him according to the
color of his shirt? This unstable and politically correct moment, where racial identification is replaced by an innocent item of clothing, is something Halabi seeks in many of the works in this exhibition.
 

Halabi imports skin color into his art but in a way which can never be purely artistic or disconnected from its social and political connotations. In this sense, Halabi uses skin color in the same way as he did the plaster and mortar in his construction series: For him, the act of painting is akin to the act of construction – laying the brushstroke is akin to laying the
mortar. Just like the construction workers, kitchen workers, immigrants and refugees who
appear in his previous works, skin color is a "transparent" form that we must practice seeing, a social blind spot that is ignored and denied, which art can not only show, but also
demonstrate how to see.