Vera Tamari
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Vera Tamari was born in Jerusalem, Palestine. She is a multidisciplinary artist specializing in ceramic sculpture and conceptual art with a focus on nature. She has exhibited widely in Palestine, the Arab world, Europe, the UK, Japan, and the USA. Vera is actively involved in the promotion of art and culture in Palestine and has served for more than two decades as professor of Islamic art and architecture and art history at Birzeit University, where she also founded and directed the Birzeit University Museum, in 2005, and serves until today on its board of directors. In 2021, Vera participated in Rebel Landscapes, an Embassy Cultural House online group exhibition in partnership with Toronto Palestinian Film Festival (TPFF), and, in 2022, the ECH's international project Pandemic Gardens: Resilience Through Nature, coordinated by Ron Benner and Rachel MacGillivary.
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Four Seasons, 2014 (4 pieces)
Ceramic sculpture and coloured slips
Summer, 2014
Enwrapped by the warmth of the sun, the summer vegetation soars up to the sky in full fruition, as if in a prayer 
Spring, 2014
In spring, the earth opens up its arms as it dances softly to welcome the rebirth of life |
Autumn, 2014
Awaiting the upcoming slumber, autumn stands in nobility and respect to embrace and protect the aging of life 
Winter, 2014
Tumultuous thunder and flowing waters wake the earth from its winter slumber, to impregnate it with goodness and fertility |
Olive Tree Women, 2009 and 2019 (5 pieces)
Installation: Fabric Collage, thread, inks, and watercolour crayons
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Caressed by time, wrapped by the narrative of the land, twisted by the gusty winds of history, impregnated with abundance, this is to me how the olive trees in the hills of Palestine take form. They are like female dancers twirling around in a slow but deeply intense and sensual Sufi trance. They are mother centurions who for centuries have stood fiercely there to protect and defend. They are like tale tellers whispering their stories across the landscape, singing their ballad to the world. Olive trees, to me, are like women, embodying great wisdom, love, and sensuality.
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Early One November Morning, 2019
Photographic Installation
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A window in my house frames the twinkling reflection of the bright morning sunlight as it falls on the leaves of the apricot tree in my garden. For years and years, and with the coming of each November, I waited to view the same mesmerizing movement of the leaves dancing to the rhythm of the soft morning breeze. Year after year, every November morning, I recorded with my iPhone the recurring visual poetry of this magical scene, its ever-changing reflections of light and shadow, the serenity giving inner calm. Yet, year after year, I cannot but reflect that beyond the peacefulness of the framed image, there is a wicked reality of brutality and loss.
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Tale of a Tree, 2002
Installation: Clay, coloured slips, photo transfer, plexiglass
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In this work, I pay tribute to the olive tree, a persistent theme in my work. For many years, I kept newspaper records of the shocking numbers of olive trees cruelly and systematically uprooted by the Israeli military authorities and by the new illegal settlers on the land historically owned by Palestinians. The appalling waves of land usurpation, destruction, and aggression manifested themselves not only in the loss of life but the loss of property as well. The olive tree, symbol of rootedness and livelihood for the Palestinians, was also severely targeted. In 2002, during the Israeli incursion into Ramallah, and while we were confined for weeks under curfew in our homes, I started making the small clay olive trees in this installation. Each time I held a clay ball in my hand, shaping it into a tree, I repeated in my mind, as if it was a “mantra”: for each olive tree uprooted here is another tree, and so it went until I made 660 trees, nowhere near the number of the million trees so far uprooted. Mine was a humble symbolic gesture.
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By the Window, 2018
Photographic Installation
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Sitting one morning at my desk with light pouring in from the open window to my left, I suddenly noticed the blurry negative silhouette of my body reflected in the glass of a landscape painting which hung on the facing wall. I was struck by the mysteriousness of that image. In a fleeting instant, my body had dramatically merged with the landscape in the painting to my right. The reflection of light formed an image of multilayered realities. There I was sitting in the middle between spaces of diverse temporalities, one of the real world and another of the world of poetic fantasy. The painting to my right was of another geography and another time; it was a watercolour landscape made many years earlier in Japan by Vladimir, my late brother, while to my left was the physical “here” and “now” of my computer, the wrought-iron window, its curtain, and beyond that the patterns of the fluttering leaves of the apricot tree in my garden. My world and that of my brother thus became fused in that ephemeral moment despite the geographic distance and time. Transformed by light and by our reciprocal yet geographically remote artistic realities, a new mystically charged image was composed, an image of many hidden manifestations and feelings.
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Fragmented Landscape, 1995
Ceramic bas relief, wood, acrylic
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The magical landscape as I ride daily to work from Ramallah to Birzeit casts a spell on me. Repeated patterns of rolling hills softly blend one into another until they smoothly vanish in the horizon, uniting within the infinite space of the Mediterranean. Earth and water unite. The magic is also in the broken surfaces of the rocks, in the bushes clinging to the terraced ridges, in twisted olive tree trunks telling textured tales of history and time. The magic is everywhere on my daily trip from Ramallah to Birzeit, giving boundless energy of inspiration. But paralleling this landscape is another one, ruptured and brutal, disfiguring the tranquility of my vision.
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