Landscapes of Desire, Drawings by John Halaka
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John Halaka’s [ http://www.johnhalaka.com/slideshow/ ] drawings Landscapes of Desire are inspired by the ruins of Palestinian villages and homes that were destroyed by Israel during and after the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine. The images compel the viewer to reflect on the unrelenting effort by the Jewish State to annihilate a culture that refuses to disappear and an indigenous people that refuse to go away. The ruins of stone homes from destroyed Palestinian villages such as Kafr Bir’im, Lifta and Al-Bassa, poetically represented in Halaka’s drawings, are a declaration that in the face of looming cultural annihilation, the persistence of memory is a crucial act of resistance.
John Halaka is an activist artist whose creative work serves as a vehicle for meditation on personal, cultural and political concerns. The primary focus of his work over the past two and a half decades can be summarized as an ongoing reflection on the frailty and resilience of the human condition and the persistent search for self-realization in the face of personal and cultural self-delusion. Halaka is of Palestinian descent and was born in El Mansoura, Egypt, in 1957. He is a Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of San Diego, where he has taught since 1991. He received his MFA in the Visual Arts from the University of Houston in 1983 and his BA in Fine Arts from CUNY Brooklyn in 1979. He has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally.
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