December 9 , 2009

Defining Freedom By Its Limits

BU Students Explore Their Thoughts Through Art

Freedom is a vague concept in Palestine, says Ms. Samar Ghattas, Lecturer in Humanities at Bethlehem University. Living under occupation, she continues “has distorted [Palestinians’] understanding of freedom” because they have limited opportunities to exercise it. To get her Art Appreciation students thinking about freedom in more concrete ways, she asked them to create works for the exhibition that opened Wednesday, 2 December 2009 and ran through Friday, 4 December 2009.

Conceptions of freedom depend on what an individual feels deprived of, says Art Appreciation student Saleh (BU ’11). For Saleh, who dreamed of studying to be a pilot in Italy, family pressures kept him in Palestine and away from his aviation program.  For one female student, says classmate Mohammad (BU ’10), her image of a woman riding a motorcycle speaks of the things she feels she cannot do.

Participating students have spent the past two months preparing for the exhibition, explains Ms. Samar, discussing the concepts and preparing their individual pieces.  The suppression that accompanies occupation made the assignment difficult for students, she says. “It was hard for them to talk about this idea.” Limits Palestinians face in their rights of expression, movement and residence meant that “students could not express freedom. They could not express themselves.”

Another challenge, Samar continues, lay in convincing students that they could express themselves through art, even if they don’t consider themselves artists. While many of the students in the course have no art experience, says Mohammad, everyone has something to contribute.  “I cannot draw or do art work, but I have the ability to deliver ideas.”

“I was working on the idea of freedom for Gaza,” Mohammad says of his piece. “I had a main idea to make a map from cork, with somebody holding his fingers in a victory sign on top of it. I cut the cork, painted it, and then attached the pieces to each other. The sign of victory extends to include all the land of Palestine, not only the West Bank. For the symbol of victory I thought of Yasser Arafat, because he is the symbol for Palestinians and Palestine.”  

Not all the meditations on freedom were so specific to Palestine though. In fact, students were asked to think about personal freedom, what it means and how it can be practiced, explained Ms. Samar. For student Da’ad (BU ’11), the topic reminded her of the way love can be an excuse for control. “Once Ms. Samar told us about this exhibition,” she said “I had this idea in my mind” of how men control women in the name of love. “It comes from personal experience.”

While course students learned about freedom, Ms. Samar thinks there are even broader lessons in store for the exhibition audience. Art, she says, is the conclusion of a process of asking oneself questions and searching for answers. Beyond perspectives on freedom, she believes the exhibition will help audience members appreciate art work as the product of human thought.