Reem Kawasmi and Sereen Khass celebrate the resurgence of Palestinian arts by connecting creative communities
Words by Dalia Al-Dujaili
In this long-read feature, AZEEMA’s Digital Editor Dalia Al-Dujaili sits down with two Palestinian creatives, Reem and Sereen, who are changing the way Palestine is perceived through its art, fashion and culture. Having worked at the iconic tRASHY Clothing, headed by Palestinian Shukri Lawrence aka Wifi Rider, they’ve turned towards building upon their own work and brands. They share their experiences of living under Israeli occupation, how Western hegemony has seeped into their work, and how they began to root their work back into Palestinian heritage. Reem and Sereen also tell us what actions they’re taking to achieve their ambitions for the future of a reviving Palestinian art scene.
Western culture is the archetype around the world and it is held up as the gold standard, a phenomenon is otherwise known as Western cultural hegemony. For the Middle Eastern creative diaspora, we can’t escape it. Everywhere we go and everything we create, we are told to fit it into Western moulds and adjust it to Western gazes, making it consumable to Western audiences. But that doesn’t change if you’ve remained in the region. Those within the Middle East today have grown up under American or European imperialism and occupation, thereby consuming Western content and becoming ashamed of their own art, literature, music, fashion and creative culture because it isn’t Hollywood. This results in a mimicking game doomed to fail from its outset. And now, we have the affirmation and validation of ourselves to not want to escape it either. In fact, we’re embracing it like never before, and the boom in creative and cultural production from the Middle East which represents both our historic and our contemporary identities is flowering. This is supported by a growing reclamation of heritage in the diaspora meaning a growing demand for authentic production in the Middle East.
In Palestine, young creatives are embodying this new sentiment. Emboldened by a flame of resentment for being made to feel as if their own culture and arts were inferior to the Western hegemony, two young women – Reem Kawasmi and Sereen Khass – are using fashion, styling and creative direction to create and maintain a strong creative community, mostly made up of youth, in Palestine. Having previously worked with the now semi-iconic tRASHY CLOTHING, headed by Shukri Lawrence, the two designers learnt what it meant to create Palestinian culture and to share it with the world. Shukri is labelled a “WiFi Rider”, as the eponymous documentary directed by Roxy Rezvany establishes, and he’s earned this title by using the digital epoch to his advantage. When the world suddenly figured it was ‘cool’ to be in support of Palestinian liberation on account of Bella Hadid, and other spearheading activists using social media to vocalise, Palestinian culture started getting a lot more visibility than it was previously allowed. Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and Twitter are all places to get a good glimpse into the creativity flourishing in the region and what Palestinian arts and culture looks like, and it’s started to make young Palestinians more proud of their heritage and culture than ever before.
tRASHY Clothing, Still from WiFi Rider, Copyright © Roxy Rezvany.
Reem met Shukri when she started working with ArtLab, an organisation in East Jerusalem, where they would experiment with film photography. “At first, we tried to become like fashion bloggers slash influencers. That’s kind of like how it started.” After a six-month stint studying Fine Art in the Netherlands, Reem got “too homesick”, explaining she felt it “wasn’t the time” for her to leave the country. “So when I came back,” she continues, “Shukri had already begun working on tRASHY clothing.” After making t-shirts for the brand before supporting the runway show in Berlin in 2018, Reem now works mainly as a freelance makeup artist whilst studying project management, “because we need a lot of improvements in this country regarding organization and coordination,” she tells me. This piques my interest, as Reem’s sentiments feed into another phenomenon taking place in the Middle East. Many young people are choosing to stay in their home country and build on their skills, or return to their home country after living and studying in the West, with the aim of regenerating industry, culture and community instead of trying to build a new life in America or Europe. “There was a part of my life where I'm just like, I don't want to be here. I want to leave the country. I I want to start a new life and all that stuff. But no, I realised that I'm privileged enough to like, have the skills that I have. And like all these things where I belong here, and I need to help people over here like improve their life. Like that's kind of my thing now where I'm just want to help build a community and bring us closer together, as as respectfully as I can. Like, now I know how to like push boundaries, but at the same time, still do it in a respectful way where it's it can be still socially acceptable.
Reem lives in Beit Hanina, East Jerusalem. She holds a Blue ID which allows her to enter the West Bank but she doesn’t hold an Israeli passport, as those from Haifa or Yaffa do. But Reem’s New York-born and raised mother means Reem was naturalised at birth and given an American passport. She traces this as being the entry point for a deeply rooted American sensibility and voice within her own work. Reem says that her grandfather, who left Palestine in 1960 before the issuing of the ID-card system in 1967, emigrated to America in order to provide for family back home, and he met Reem’s grandmother.
Her grandmother’s own family emigrated in 1912, so Reem says they were not just American, but “super American”. Reem’s grandfather had saved enough money and decided to move back to Palestine to build a home and so Reem grew up around her mother’s family in Jerusalem. “Unfortunately, they're all back in America now. They were never able to get their IDs, the only reason I have an ID is that my mum married my father, who’s from here.” Reem’s formative years were spent around her mother’s family, which is why, she says, her English is stronger than her Arabic and why she “naturally became more and more Western” after being exposed to her aunts’ fashion, the way the spoke, and the way they acted. It wasn’t until she was on the cusp of adulthood, at 18, that Reem began to realise how “American” she was compared to everyone else. But, as is to be expected with the nature of dual identities, when visiting family in America once or twice a year, Reem felt a huge disconnect with the people; she was ‘othered’ in a way she’d never experienced before; “I've never felt ‘brown’ until I reached America. My skin may not show it, but I feel super brown there.”
This split identity made Reem realise she wanted to, and could be, a part of the growth of Palestinian industry: “We’re lacking the infrastructure for industry here. We’re basically pioneering this at this point, even something as simple as me going and doing makeup on sets. That’s something that’s pretty new here.” For Reem, staying in Palestine was mostly about community; she feels a sense of camaraderie with Palestinian creatives and locals that she didn’t feel in America, where everyone was “super dry”. She also feels that “times are changing, people are changing” in Palestine, and by showing her authentic self, she believed she’s helping other young Palestinians express themselves.
Sereen also worked with Shukri at tRASHY Clothing and has since gone on to work on music videos and start Syko, a sustainable fashion brand that blends modern techniques with heritage clothing in order to make the Palestinian more appealing to locals “before reaching the Western world or Europe, because locals or the community are the ones who make the project, that’s what we believe in.” Sereen says that technically, she was very much influenced by Western culture and media when creating, because the technical skills were something she couldn’t access in Palestine, but she wasn’t totally consumed by it. When she was introduced to her local art scene, she met musicians and producers who had started blending their Arabic and folklore heritage in their art and in their music: “I think it inspired me a lot,” she tells me.
Sereen Khass in WiFi Rider, Copyright © Roxy Rezvany.
Like Reem, Sereen believes that we can’t escape the inevitability of Western influences in Middle Eastern arts and culture. “After you design or create or whatever you do to produce an art piece, you always fall into a trap that you’re not aware of whilst you're in the process. After you see your work, you understand that you're like pretty influenced by Western culture. And you might think you’d I prefer to have something that is completely Arab or Palestinian. But it's hard because again we miss some of the techniques here because a lot of things happening in our lives. That's why we have this mix. It's not bad to learn from other cultures and to learn the right things.”
We cannot deny the globalised nature of today’s digital age, and for creatives who are trying to maintain a sense of their heritage in their work, that can be a double-edged sword. Western cultural production can reach across thousands of miles of sea and land instantaneously, something my friend Noor and I became acutely aware of when, on a visit to Jordan’s Petra, we came across Berber tribes playing Biggie Smalls out of their iPhones as they leant on their camels. Whilst this can support the worry that all other culture becomes diluted and erased, it could also be argued that the accessibility and rapidity of the internet, tech and media can bolster culture and encourage diverse narratives. “I learned the power of the internet through being in tRASHY Clothing, and it doesn't just regard tRASHY Clothing, it regards us as Palestinians,” Reem explains how the internet and social media are the one way that Palestinians can connect despite the barriers and borders that face them. “Someone from Gaza can collaborate with someone from Ramallah right now just because of the internet. And that is truly amazing. That's how we're getting more close-knit and understanding how every little city has their own scene, and now the scenes are connecting.”
Reem working on production, courtesy of Reem Kawasmi.
In May last year, there was a huge surge of online attention directed at Palestine as its people, who were yet again the targets of unlawful treatment and disproportionate violence by the Israeli government and its military, began sharing their experiences online. “Everyone in our community was shocked by how we were able to make a small difference. We were always on the news, we were always being shown as these animals. And then you have social media blowing up, giving us the ability to just press live while you're in the protests.” Reem’s friend was one of these live streamers and was blown away by how many people asked her to keep recording her life in Palestine under Israeli occupation because they had never seen it before. “You don't realise how much power you have just by holding your phone and doing something like that,” claims Reem, “they really started something that we never had before.”
More so, Reem welcomes the fusion of cultures, claiming she’s not rejecting Western pop culture, but she’s instead showing Western audiences what it’s like to be a creative in Palestine, showing that “we’re not just all sitting here on camels, we do have interests, the occupation isn’t the only thing in our heads all the time. We’re just trying to live our lives at the end of the day.” For the right reasons, ‘Palestine’ has become somewhat of a phrase of the zeitgeist because of the occupation being witnessed globally, but this has given the region a monolithic representation. Reem is one of many who is just trying to show the world how they live; photoshoots in front of the wall are just one example of how the occupation interacts with the daily lives of Palestinians and informs their culture beyond conflict.
“I hate social media,” Sereen tells me, but she also admits it’s one of the best ways to be seen as a creative. Instagram, she says, “is like our CV now, it's where you put your work. It's the place where you show who you are and what we're trying to say.” Sereen echoes Reem’s earlier sentiments regarding the the lacking infrastructure of the art scene in Palestine. “To improve our fees, we depend, unfortunately, on Western funds, with agendas.”
Sereen Khass in WiFi Rider, Copyright © Roxy Rezvany.
Reem is on a mission to make the word Palestine a more friendly word, allowing imports and exports to move more freely – right now, resources on the ground are limited for fashion and production. Palestine, before the occupation, was very successful in trading was very successful, and like cotton, linen, silk, all these kinds of things. But this industry has died down because there's no more like demand for it from the international markets and stuff like that. So this has been a major struggle. And by just building brands here, it's helping revive that and it's helping them like not give up anymore on on their craft. And like, it's important to preserve this.
Sereen’s own hopes for the future of the Palestinan art scene is for creatives to internally start using techniques to communicate with the locals before anyone else, “that's really missing. All our art is for a very specific community here, and it's a small community.” Sereen believes young Palestinan creatives have closed a bubble on the art scene, and as beneficial as their successes have been, she thinks the art scene’s bubble needs to burst. “I hope every individual in the art scene, including me, starts developing their skills,” so they can not only represent Palestine but create infrastructure too: “We have the concepts, we have the techniques, we have everything, but we just miss the infrastructure.”
tRASHY Clothing, Still from WiFi Rider, Copyright © Roxy Rezvany.