In Fahed Halabi’s work Sheinkin-Melchett (2009), the artist is seen casting the concrete roof of a building on the corner of these two streets in central Tel Aviv. From the point of view on the rooftop, the city of Tel Aviv is exposed with its roofs, balconies, and new high-rise apartment buildings. The camera moves between the signs of advanced modernity and irreplaceable manual labor, focusing on the artist’s hands holding a plastic pipe through which he pours the concrete. The motion of the pipe calls to mind a dance or alternatively, Jackson Pollock’s expressive “action painting” technique used in his famous drip paintings. As a virtuoso artist, Halabi controls the cement flow, regulating it to fill the gaps, and the cement is smeared, pouring, dripping sensually on the surface of the roof as if it were a large-scale canvas. Halabi creates a painterly surface with gray monochromatic aesthetic alongside disillusioned, ironic class awareness.

Dance movements combined with ironic class consciousness are also evident in another video work by Halabi, To You with Love (2006), in which the artist, dressed as a builder, a tool belt around his waist, performs a belly dance to a song by Lebanese singer Nancy Ajram. During the dance Halabi takes off his shirt in a gesture reminiscent of Palestinian existential reality in the past decade, where many Palestinian men are forced to expose their bodies when crossing the checkpoints, getting on a bus, and as a routine procedure during encounters with Israeli security forces. In this work Halabi exposes an Arab-Oriental male body to Western eyes. He challenges both the stereotype regarding the Palestinian man as a security threat and a ticking clock, and the Orientalist stereotype of belly-dancing as a cheap dance performed by Eastern women. He dances sensually and with manifest pleasure with body movements that continue a long lasting tradition of Eastern-Arab dance.

Born in Majdal Shams, 1970. Lives and works in Tel Aviv-Jaffa.

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