On freedom in the Middle East

Gallery going in the capital of Jordan

The threat level proved acceptable and we traveled from stable Brighton to the Middle East and I can report that Jordan is safe, laid back, accessible, friendly and calm. And I only got told to fuck off the once, crossing a road downtown in the capital Amman.

You cannot blame the locals for this mildest expression of hostility. Britain supports, and arms, their neighbour, Israel. Out of a population of eleven and a half million, 70 percent of Jordanians are Palestinian. With my white face and blue jeans, my profile suggests I’d be blind to the war. In fact, I can hardly look away from the horror, so I can take a fuck off on the chin.

We stayed in Jabal al-Luweibdeh with friends to whom I will always be grateful. They showed us an even better welcome than they show the neighbourhood strays. That’s a lot of welcome, because they feed these cats, name them, bring them inside and stroke them. They want to bring more cute cats home from restaurant car parks, and why not – the cats are very lovely, but that’s another story.

Their neighbourhood is beautiful, and the coffee machine was at our disposal. It was sunny, and we were just a street away from the Jordan National Museum of Fine Arts. So I arrive there on day two and the card reader is broken. It is seven Jordanian Dinar to get in (about £8), I have no cash and the security guard speaks no English. He took me to see his office-bound colleague who listened to me claim to be a journalist and let me in without charge.

The experience of this many-pictured space was to build in enjoyment, floor by floor, as I got used to the refreshing absence of familiar names, schools, isms and the many other clues which might grace a Tate or a Guggenheim. Being so ignorant of so many artists from across the Levant, the Gulf and even South Asia, I was at least at a liberty to form my own impressions.

In this respect it was a morning off from criticking. More tourist than journalist, I had the tourist’s greedy appreciation of having a whole museum almost entirely to myself. I could therefore entertain a liking for likeness, a love of colour, a feel for the drama of brush strokes, which are different from cat strokes but can also make the viewer purr at times.

My time was limited so my hubristic survey of art from the global south was only able to reach a few conclusions: as many geniuses have lived here as have lived in Paris or New York; one finds that painters and sculptors took minimal ideas from the west, a poor trade for the assets the west has stolen; and pictorial appeal is lasting appeal.

As an example of that reactionary dictum, there was a work called The Wooden Cage Maker, in which the very frame itself looked terribly constrictive. Egyptian artist Inji Efflatoun has captured our gaze here with a long-limbed, squatting figure who ably fills the plane: giving me the conundrum of a cage maker within a cage, making cages – any one of which could lock us away We become for him (and her) just chickens or rabbits in the face of a powerful artisan, whose axes are within dangerous reach.

To discover this many newly built cages, wooden and hand crafted as they are, in the midst of a museum, in a national collection, of course brought to mind various cages which we might fashion in order to lock up, or nail down, the reception of works of art. Western styles may be followed to order, but inspiration will always slip through the bars.

It is a liberating realisation. Art takes flight as the cages stack up. Another piece, on another floor, Freedom, offered a counterweight to Efflatoun’s cage maker. Jordanian artist Mai Qaddoura offers an installation from some 45 pairs of gypsum-white hands, hung from the ceiling in an arrangement not unlike Pascal’s triangle. All hands make the time-honoured gesture for fluttering wings and, by some magic of art, their avian shadows escape all bounds.

Later that day we visited the Citadel, a complex of Roman ruins atop Jebel Al-Qal’a. As I looked across the valley at the adjacent sprawl of sand-coloured apartments and offices I saw the scene as an array of wares stacked in a cage maker’s yard. But in the wide air between us was a local flock of doves, murmurating against a blue sky. And the sky was already vibrating with an extended, musical and very loud call to prayer. Religion, depending on your viewpoint, is a prison or a release.

In the ruins of a temple, stray cats roamed here too, utterly free.