10 Questions with Sharon Rose Benson

Al-Tiba9 Art Magazine ISSUE16 | Featured Artist

Sharon Rose was born and raised in occupied Haifa. Sharon will graduate this year with a BA in history and multidisciplinary arts. She is eclectic, working on performance theory, storytelling, fashion, and dance juxtaposed with the big questions of our histories. Sharon has always been in a between state; her existence surfaces a lot of contradictions and hypocrisies. While she lives under occupation, with freedom of movement, contrary to the majority of her Palestinian brothers and sisters, she questions nationality, loyalty, and submission to systems of oppression. She explores her sovereignty within capitulating or even 'tempting' circumstances. She also explores fluidity and meaning and brings these questions back to her audiences. Benson has exhibited her art performances Spade (2022) in her hometown Haifa, and Classical Myths (2023) at the award-winning Art the Arms Fair 2023 edition, 'We ain't dED yet' (Gallery 46, London), along with showcasing video art KISMET (2024) at the Crypt Gallery London.

@sharonrose.fm

ARTIST STATEMENT

Sharon Rose is a multidisciplinary expressionist artist who delves into the essence of 'humanness' and community amidst an increasingly automated and dehumanized state of the world. Through mixed media creations, she fosters collective engagement to challenge societal norms, prompting revolutionary thoughts. Her combinations of performance, theatricality, fashion, installation, sound, poetry, and historical thinking create sensory-rich experiences that encourage wonder and play.

By transcending mental and material barriers, Benson aims to reveal new perspectives and ultimately pursue a dialogic approach to challenge perceptions of the material world, aiming to reshape how we experience it. Benson often invites other artists to collaborate, fostering a holistic exploration of philosophical questions that push the constructed boundaries. In unison, they aim to spark transformative thoughts that evolve into new creations, perpetuating a cycle of exploration and innovation within the collective experience.

The Grand Illusion (الوهم الكبير) | Project Statement

This project captures the process of growing up, of being groomed into this world, into the needs and wants a true girl ought to have. We highlight and aestheticize standards built to overpower women and critique them. It draws inspiration from campy contemporary Arab wedding styles as tools to communicate a story of questioning and redefining the relationship with those standards, transmuting that which overpowers us into tools for the reclamation of agency and play.
In this shoot, women stand as the embodiment of all marginalized individuals, regardless of their sex or gender. It is a narrative that resonates with all those who grapple with the oppressive force of societal norms. The wedding, as an initiation into society, is a form of ritual that embezzles potential, molding women into societal ideals. I want to be a bride, and a bride society needs me to be. This collaboration was made together with amazing artists from all across Palestine. We long to fortify the community, despite complications that the occupation poses to our togetherness.

AL-TIBA9 ART MAGAZINE ISSUE16

INTERVIEW

Can you share more about your background and how growing up in occupied Haifa has influenced your art and the themes you gravitate toward?

I'm bilingual; I grew up speaking Arabic and English. At 18, I had to start using a different language, Hebrew, just to do regular stuff like finding a job, enrolling in university, and general bureaucracy. Since I was a kid, I had to explain myself a lot. There's suspicion that someone isn't easy to racially identify in a land where polarization drives people to actively determine whether they are allies or enemies. I look 'different' and have a 'weird' name, which I'd get interrogated for in my daily life. Sometimes, I wished I was more "identifiable" as an enemy or friend to spare the "small talk."
Little me used to think I lived in an Arabic country, Lebanon to be exact, cause we'd watch Lebanese TV and go to only Arab schools in a predominantly Arab neighborhood; our teachers would tell us, "You need Hebrew for the future"- the f- does that mean?!  
We sang a lot of folklore songs about Falasteen at school before I was politically aware, even "We don't fear the police, we're the children of Palestine, Palestine is our land", and I was always curious. I lived a simple, protected, and conservative life; a steady routine was my life goal, and nonconfrontational was a key to survival, as a woman, as an Arab woman. But short and reserved answers never satisfied me.
Why do I feel inferior? Why do I hate myself? Why am I confused that my mother did not agree to go to America when my father proposed? How is this place better? What is in this life that repulses me? When it dawned on me what my mother had done for me, I kissed her, thanking her for her decision to raise me in my home. Between what could've been and what is, between the epitome of ignorance (America) and facing the many truths (Palestine)- I'm blessed for truth. 
I always saw myself as living in the cracks, looking at illusions around me, at masks performing. I felt purposeful to witness these conflicting realities all poured into one existence, mine, the misery of existing. But what was messed up all along was trying to define myself "I seek not to define myself, to not lose myself" (Mahmoud Darwish). Ignorance is like being lost; a fixed identity is like a cage. No matter what I know or don't know, I want beyond; seeking truth will be my compass, and God always answers, and I choose to listen.

You are a multidisciplinary artist working with performance theory, storytelling, fashion, and dance. Why did you focus on different mediums, and how has your academic journey helped you develop your practice?

I try to focus on what I gravitate towards, the passion is big. What draws me? What does it want from me? What can it bring out from me? What can they do together? I love to find connections, to see patterns, to critique, to find ways to make mediums conversate and work together in chaotic order. I'd rather politicize my art than to make it exclusive.  I realized education is the most important thing in the world. How can I incorporate my education (tool box ) into my art?
I've studied History and Multidisciplinary arts with a focus on performance and theatre, I  had the privilege to read from amazing thinkers. One I can recall that affirmed the magic I feel is reflected in Bakhtin's  "surprisingness": there is always an "unrealized surplus of humanness"; no science can make human beings predictable. While I witness the media, mainstream curriculum and culture act as a counter agent that aims to make humans all the same, and grants them "their" opinions. I belong to the world view that we are dangerously unpredictable, in God alone, if we'd just rebel against our trained bodies and minds.
My special focus in my studies ,and extends into my practice deals with consciousness and memory engineering, social programming and self perception; perspective. How can I explore that with my movement? What story can I tell and how, to try to communicate the complex beauty and questions in our experience. I've come to conclude time and time again, nothing is set in stone, what a blessing!! Everything is fluid and all connected, and it is all the same situation with an altered consciousness. 

Speaking of your work, you deal with themes of nationality, loyalty, systems of oppression, community, and humanness. How are these concepts reflected in your work, and where do you get your inspiration from?

My plain existence against the official categorization of things. Just being born grants to be toyed by society and state-sponsored curriculum - how dare they try to shape me? 
The meaninglessness and purposefulness of everything inspires me, my environment is a playground for that. Everything in it speaks to me; it can be a building,  a story told, or I witness something. I'm inspired by the things that come to me via all the senses. Everything is for me, not against me. God speaks.
My works come to life by asking questions related to my environment and how it functions, as well as the constant triggers of identity shaping, politics, and spirituality. These are all themes I work through in my day to day, I like to examine them, test them and critique them; I problematize what is normalized.

Your artist statement mentions fostering collective engagement and challenging societal norms. What key messages do you hope audiences take away from these works?

The only constant in this life is change, which is exciting. I hope my works give the audience a sense of no ground underneath them; there's nothing there. I hope my art opens up questions, not about me, but the embedded subjects and concepts I put out there. Identity is a killer; it kills the potential of expansion and building onto what you know or "who you are." I call it a stubborn death. I just hope my art can give a sense of positive meaninglessness to the world, against what we define it to be, that we can consider how much ground we can really play on, and from there, we can really build.I say we are a fortress waiting to be realized. These are big concepts, but I'm working on them.

You also collaborate with artists and art professionals for your performances and installations. How do you approach these collaborations, and what do you believe is the value of these partnerships?

Art is never a one-person creation. I like to create workspaces where I can enable new revolutionary thoughts or put myself in a position to travel and explore more. I reach out to artists whose vision touches me or whose way of thinking inspires me. I'm fascinated by the artists I collaborate with.  I want to know about other perspectives and experiences (whether in research or execution) to expand my sensitivity and broaden the purpose of my art. Inclusivity in a way that sharpens the story is not a decorative element. 
I feel when I incorporate artists to my process, it makes the work veiny with perspectives and fingerprints. I let the connection to the project subject weave each's perspectives together. How can our art meet, conversate and blend to tell a story or ask a vital question? And I think partnership is the most valuable element especially when you were trained to be estranged and in exile from one another.

Diving deep into your work, can you explain the concept behind your project, THE GRAND ILLUSION, and its critique of societal standards for women?

My stories can be read on multiple levels. There's the symbolic story, the meta-story, and additional spontaneous parallels. While the main story is about grooming girls from childhood to fit societal standards for women in regards to looks, body language, appearance and life course-- it does challenge the general phenomena of illusionary identities believed and performed in society. 
For this, I took the approach of "a body that is written on but also writes." While tight corsets, heavy makeup, andextravagance can be signified as methods to tame women, so can reframing them tell a whole new story. A refusal to normalize subjugation reconfigures the dynamics between the women and this "authority." 
Deeper, we can look at what Fanon contends about the natives, that they refuse to comply as a product of the setter's world. They reject their objectification as "a face bereft of all humanity," which results in taking "authority out of the picture." We can always change reality, but how can we have that vision if we nurture ourselves with self-hate? So rebel! Rebel on the tight corsets and the extra lashes, rebel as Nizar Qabbani says, and conquer the big illusions of history; I love it when you rebel!

Your most recent work is "QISMA," a multi-channel, interactive installation that explores the boundaries of perceptual reality. Can you tell us more about this work, its process, and the inspiration behind it?

The IBA in London had contacted me to showcase in one of their shows, and I had to cancel due to my mother's deteriorating health situation; a month later, beautiful Sofia had passed; God bless her soul. More than half a year passed, and they contacted me again for another upcoming show; I was flattered, but my grief was worsening, and the genocide in Gaza had intensified in October on a full scale, and suddenly, everything was dark. I was questioning my purpose once again, and this time, nothing will ever be the same. I wasn't sure if I had any capacity to make a work or to be alive, but I opened up my notebook, and I knew I had so many visions yet to share that I'd been stacking up for years. 
QISMA really is an entire universe that I see, and "through it," I make sense of the happenings in the world. It's my inner questions, observations, inner visions, beliefs, prayers, and intense passion. There's inspiration from both Biblical and Quranic stories and wisdom, as well as eschatological and ontological works from ancient and medieval times. 
And after my mother's passing, I was reassured of other worlds and their interaction with ours. I felt the peace my mother was in for a second, and I realized we did not come to this earth for pleasure. My work is condensed and hosts at least seven characters. Each is an entire universe with a function in the cosmos; each image is crafted as a visual capsule of poems, ideas, and cries. I feel like QISMA is an initial introduction to the vision I've been exploring for the past 5-6 years of my life. This piece is really from my heart and from the mind, too.

Coming from occupied Palestine, your work reflects the environment and the challenges your country and its people have faced. What do you think is the role of art in addressing such themes? Is art a valuable tool to shine a light on situations often overlooked?

My work represents my own perspective as a Palestinian living inside the belly of the beast. I might have experiences that overlap or relate to other Palestinians, but it will never be the same. Our stories all connect somewhere, and it's importantfor me to continue to learn from my people; as I may still be oblivious to others' obstacles, I need to know when it is my right to speak and when it's my turn to just listen with undivided attention. This is what my struggle teaches me, a nuanced sensitivity. There are always priorities. 
My mere placement changed the course of my life. I will not be thankful to those who draw borders of oppression on God's land, but I will only be mindful of that randomness, that I'm nobody, and will never let an unfixed human given 'status' give me any pride or reason to fight against my own flesh and blood. 
I share my own personal challenges that deal more with perception and self-value; I ask what the bigger picture is andwhere I can insert myself. I can share what I know of the fragmented struggles of the common one, but my work cannot fully or even partially reflect the overall challenges. But if you ask me about Palestine, I will tell you about her people, her real heroes, and her beauty; I will cry, telling you about the landscape cloaked with violence; I'll tell you about the beautiful souls and their dreams and how badly I pray for liberation. 
As for art, I see it as a means to showcase the world through different lenses. It may have some scope on an emotional perspective or expose a problem, discourse, or question. Art should activate the mind to play with the ideas that bounce up. Also, the mind should pursue art this way. Let art transport you to reflect on the world with new parameters and consider them. For me, Art should carry questions about existence and shed light on our own biases and our ownillusions. Art shouldn't want to be seen, but felt, its thoughts and suggestions considered.

Looking ahead, what future projects or themes are you excited to explore in your art?

I want to continue to explore oneness, find ways to illustrate it and embody it as I feel it in my bones. I love keeping up with technologies, but not so much that I want to use them but I think things like AI and singularity bring up very dormant questions about communication, essence and power. Who do we become if our image or likeness does not really belong to us? How does that make you feel? What new thoughts can fertilize in an environment like this? 

Lastly, what is one wish or goal you hope to achieve this year?

This year, I wish to keep my seriousness in my dance practice so I can one day choreograph an entire piece. Dance has a powerful essence and transcends the verbal. A lot of times, I look out the window and ask God to end it all, but if the appointed time is not this moment, we all must keep going and arm ourselves with wisdom, compassion, and direct action. We need to be knit in love and sacrifice.