Yesterday, to take a break from walking in the rain, we stopped at the Museum of Contemporary Art (M HKA). On the first floor there were some interesting notions, like the curved half-door.
Or the devil dog impaled on a branch.
But the main exhibit was on the second floor featuring recent Palestinian art. Victimization was the theme. The colorful abstract paintings that might have provided a balance were held up in Qatar.
There were some interesting videos of hardscrabble camp life. One showed how families gathered nettles that were ground up and mashed into a paste mixed with bulgar. It reminded me of Francis Parkman and Bernard DeVoto writing about frontier fur trappers and mountain guides like Kit Carson who, when deer were scarce and buffaloes exterminated, lived off what we nowadays would consider prickly desert ground cover. There was a Native American tribe outsiders called “Diggers” (Shoshone, Paiute, Ute) who, because large-scale agriculture wasn’t practical, subsisted on roots. Like the present day Palestinian nomads, they scratched subsistence from weedy rocks.
When it came to the American West, Kit Carson was the true Pathfinder. But he was also, in his quest to settle a frontier, merciless. Don’t get in the way of Kit! If you do, you’ll end up living on nettles.
The exhibit at the Contemporary was like watching ugly history being brought back to life. But even then, the meal made out of nettles, Akoub, looked delicious.