The Field of Dreams
Bashar Khalaf

In our world today, the “anxious artist” stands alone, confronting multiple destinies as his own self appears as a broken machine, spinning restlessly like a swirl in a hopeless attempt to piece together its fragmented parts!

The Field of Dreams is an exploration of formations of “steel“ in the public space from the perspective of the relationship between the self, the object, and the other. It can be viewed as an interactive space with the fragile reality in which humanity lives. Artist Bashar Khalaf creates an ambiguous dialogue with accumulated “steel” by employing oil painting in two series of artworks: The Junk Garden and The Protective Shield.

In a complex language, Khalaf confronts us with the dilemma of the present, not with the goal of transcending it, but of comprehending and understanding it. In fact, this state of contradictions possesses an exceptional ability to fix our gaze upon the era in which we live, focusing on its most ambiguous aspects. This is the essence of the thinking of a “contemporary” artist who, as Giorgio Agamben describes, “fixes his gaze so firmly upon his era that he doesn’t perceive its light, but its darkness.”

The Field of Dreams, or dreams as minefields, is nothing more than the dysfunctional and non-operative dreams of “junk”, that remind us with their dynamic state, in which their multiplicity and dependence on modern structures of unbridled capitalism and the transformative domination of life cannot be intercepted.

Dreaming energy grants these bygone “steel” structures, bulldozers, vehicles, and surveillance cameras, an immense power for self-reinvention and the regeneration of their own symbols of understanding the world.  We witness the shattered machine losing itself in the chaos of its struggle with destiny, much like a war where power crumbles before the energy of metal in its unveiling and portrayal of the true face of the world. It confronts the machine with its own existence, giving it a tragic form, and engaging deeply with the cycle of time to reposition itself differently in relation to the world and others.

Bashar Khalaf emphasizes his paradoxical dialogue by depicting “garbage bins” in The Protective Shield, highlighting their multifaceted role during the First Intifada, when they were used to block streets, stopping the advancement of the colonial-settler war machine in Palestinian cities, and providing shelter from bullets during confrontations.  In contrast, the colonial system used steel barrels to seal off the entrances to villages and camps after filling them with cement, aiming to besiege and isolate Palestinians. Between these two situations, Khalaf takes us to such a crumbling form, in the center of a swirl, deliberately merging “steel” within its own parts and redundant images, from the perspective of the personal transformation accumulated in his past images.

The contradiction of “steel” (the thing and its opposite) proposed by The Field of Dreams allows for a “contemporary” understanding of roles and consequences, and clearly presents an order of things. It grants us a human dimension loaded with emotions, as if humanity was flowing into the machine, seeing itself swinging between the locality of pain and the universality of sorrow, and the transformation of consciousness caused by the “merciless” capitalist structures, in line with the madness of dominance, the sweeping absorption, and the fierce competition on resources without regard for rights in conflicts. This, in turn, makes the machine itself play a role in shaping thought and consolidating the foundations of control, as it derives its power from humanity’s weakness, which relinquished its freedom for the illusion of freedom, by recognizing itself in the form and value of commodities.

The Field of Dreams poses profound questions about whether humanity will adopt fundamentally different choices from the contemporary process of hegemony. Perhaps artist Bashar Khalaf is restoring the power of critique through his project by capturing the rays of darkness that inhabit existing ideas and the questions they constitute.

Words by Jad Izzat Al-Ghazawi