Linda Paganelli

“The project was about symbolizing the refugees living in the camp as fish,” artist Alaa Albaba says of a recent series of paintings.

Albaba takes up the Palestinian who lived on the coast before the Nakba — the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Zionist militias ahead of the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 — and wound up in a refugee camp, cut off and forbidden from accessing the sea.

The fish that thrashes after being removed from the water serves as a metaphor for life in overcrowded refugee camps.

Sardines packed in tins — like those distributed to refugees by relief agencies after 1948 — are another potent symbol.

Albaba lives in al-Amari refugee camp near the West Bank city of Ramallah. He was born there in 1984 — “the third generation of the family after the Nakba.” His family was expelled from Lydd, now in present-day Israel.

With so many pressing needs in the camp, where poverty and unemployment rates are high, and the infrastructure in need of maintenance, art wasn’t exactly a priority.

“But after a while, art became desirable in this place,” he says.

The video explores how people create visual mental imagery in a controversial contest as Palestine/Israel. It investigates how people perceive or see thing with their mind when what can be seen depends on political reasons. It interrogates itself on how the perception of ordinary and peaceful places in Jerusalem, Ramallah, and Bethlehem can witch from a visual imagery of non-human to monstrosity.