“Beirut is really a cultural center, and it’s a lovely place to meet people from different places,” Abdelrahman Katanani, an artist from Sabra, a Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut’s southern suburbs, says. “I started from Beirut.” However, it is difficult for Palestinian artists to make it in the city’s cultural scene, he adds.

Katanani began his career doing caricatures in the Palestinian camps. His early work focused on the conditions of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and their right to return to their homeland. He used to make one caricature a week and copy it on a wall inside the camp. 

At the same time, Katanani was looking for newspapers and other outlets to publish his caricatures so his work could reach a broader audience. “I was searching for a way to get outside the camp, not to get stuck in this area,” he says. “I don’t like the refugee camp. I don’t like to stay there because the refugee camp, for me, is a graveyard. It’s a graveyard for talent, it’s a graveyard for the creativity of the youth, and it’s a graveyard for the great ideas of these youth.”

However, Katanani could not find any outlets interested in publishing his work. He became frustrated that the messages of his caricatures were stuck inside the camp.  As a result, he stopped copying his work onto the walls and focused on his studies at Lebanese University, where he had enrolled in the Faculty of Fine Arts.

“When someone wants to study art it is something very weird in the camp,” Katanani says.  It is difficult for the refugees to find jobs in general. So, when someone has the opportunity to get a university education they are usually under a lot of pressure to study engineering, medicine, or another profession that will likely provide a good and stable income.

Caricature is widely accepted inside the camp because people see it as being a form of resistance against the occupation of Palestine, Katanani continues. When you tell people you want to be a fine artist or paint nature scenes and still lives, they ask if you are crazy. “They told me, ‘look at the great artists like Cézanne and Van Gogh. They died poor,’” he says. “The main question for me wasn’t money. It was about ideas. It’s about how to show your idea,” he adds. “It is very important to get the idea outside of the camp.”

Katanani’s family supported him in his decision to study fine arts. They told him he could study what he wanted because he knew what was best. Also, caricature work was dangerous because the messages of his caricatures would get him into trouble with the various political movements in the camp. So, when Katanani said he wanted to study fine art his family encouraged him because it was safer. “My family has always supported me, and maybe without their support I couldn’t be here,” he adds.

Now, Katanani works primarily on mixed media installations, but the subject is still focused on the condition of Palestinian refugees in the camps. “I use material that I find in the refugee camp, and model it, and cut it and work with this material,” he says.

“I found that the Palestinian refugees, they are the shadows. They are not painted people, and they are not related to the oil colors,” Katanani continues. “So I started to put the shadows of people on the zinc plates. I stopped painting and just started to cut the zinc plates as a shadow of the people in the refugee camps.”

There is an analogy between the refugees and the zinc plates, Katanani says.  When the refugees were first expelled from Palestine in 1948 they lived in tents. After that, since it was illegal for them to build permanent structures, the refugees started to use zinc plates to construct houses. “The zinc plates lived with us during these 65 years… It’s the only material that lived with us since 1948,” he emphasizes.

Katanani had a difficult time making images of children out of the plates, however, because they looked very tough, he says. As a result, he started to personalize the zinc plates with more details by adding t-shirts, fingers, hair and other features. “With more details I thought the message is coming more clearly to the public,” he adds. “The message was that Palestinian refugees are not terrorists… they are people who have talents and who have abilities, and also they are creative and they deserve to live in a better place.”

Through his pieces focusing on childhood inside the camps, Katanani succeeded in bringing his work, and its message, to broader audiences. Around 2009, he won two prizes from the Sursock Museum for young and talented artists. “It was the first time something encouraged me to do more,” he says.

Following the prizes, Katanani began working with Agial gallery in Hamra. Galleries play an important role in supporting artists, he says. The gallery provided him with material to continue his work, a space to exhibit, support in promoting his pieces and a place to exchange ideas with other people involved in the art world. Working with a gallery lets you just focus on your work and not worry about anything else, he adds. With help from Agial, Katanani has now exhibited in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Qatar, Paris, London and New York and his work has been in art auctions in the United States and United Kingdom.

“Now I have the support of all the people I know,” Katanani says, not just his family. “I’m proud of it, and I’m proud of these people because they told their kids look at Abdel. He is an artists and he is getting better work than an engineer,” he adds. “The main thing is, when you become a symbol for the small kids, it’s not to be a military man, and they look to you and say I want o be just like you.”

During the Lebanese Civil War many Palestinian children were involved in military movements, he continues. “This was a catastrophe for us… The kids are our energy.” So, when they became involved in military activities, the community lost its energy and its power, he says. “Now we have to encourage them to become educated and to be very bright people in society.”

That is why Katanani’s work focuses on the experience of childhood in the camps. “It’s a story of freedom,” he says. Kids are a bridge. Everybody understands them. They are not just refugees. “They are just like all kids. They want to have their rights… to be free.”

There are miserable conditions in the camps, but the kids are playing, Katanani continues. This is the amazing thing about the kids in the camps. You see that, in a narrow, dark street with electricity and water lines hanging all over, small kids are gathering discarded material to make a ball to play with. “For me, they are getting over the camp and the misery with their imagination,” he says. “That is a very powerful thing for me.”

However, it would be very difficult for others to follow a similar path out of the camps and into Beirut’s art world, Katanani says. “You have to be very cleaver and very smart to get outside this jail called the refugee camp,” he continues. You have to insist on your choice to be an artist and be determined to get outside the camps.

“There is no movement in the camps that encourages the artistic side of the kids,” Katanani says. There are no art exhibitions in the camps and very little education for art in the schools. Palestinian artists in the camps, if they are lucky, will teach art, but they will not be able to focus on their work because they can’t afford supplies and need to make money to support their families, he adds. It is hard for them to be known and spread their work outside of the camps.

As a result, rap and graffiti are the most common art forms in the camps. The youth want to do something quick, Katanani says. With graffiti you can make a huge mural for very little money, but in fine art it costs much more to make a small painting that fewer people will see. Even so, “I hope that the artists in the camps encourage themselves to engage with this art scene [outside the camps],” he adds, even if it can be difficult.

Eric Reidy worked as project assistant at the SKeyes Center for Media and Cultural Freedom researching and writing about the cultural scene in Beirut, from November 2012 to May 2013. This article is part of an interview series with artists living, working, and creating in Beirut.

Previous Articles:

·         “Beirut has a special magic”: An interview with Syrian artist Gylan Safadi

·         “Our culture is dying”: An interview with Mohamad Hodeib

·         “It’s a place for music… Beirut”: An interview with Bilad El-Sham

·         “Culture has been put on the side”: An interview with Dima Mabsout

·         “Everyone is leaving. I’m coming here”: An interview with Omar Sabbagh

·         “If you want to understand the culture you have to meet the people”: An interview with Sabine Choucair

·         “It’s not the melting pot of the artist”: An interview with Mokhtar Beyrouth

·         “I need to show the reality”: An interview with Shewa Wolde