Snow White and The Madness of Truth
Jaradat was the subject of Snow White and The Madness of Truth, a controversial item of installation art by Swedish, Israeli-born composer and musician Dror Feiler, and his Swedish wife, artist Gunilla Sköld-Feiler.
The installation consisted of a long pool of water coloured blood red, upon which floated a small white boat named "Snövit" ("Snow White") carrying a portrait of Hanadi Jaradat, which were accompanied by text written on the nearby walls, and the sound of Bach's Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut (Cantata 199). That piece begins with the words, "My heart swims in blood / because the brood of my sins / in God's holy eyes / makes me into a monster".
The artwork became the centre of controversy when the Israeli ambassador to Sweden, Zvi Mazel, damaged the installation. After pushing some lightstands into the pool, causing a short-circuit and disabling the light, Mazel told Feiler that "This is not a work of art. This is an expression of hatred for the Israeli people. This has glorified suicide bombers". Further he said to the press that the piece constituted a "complete legitimization of genocide, the murder of innocent people, innocent civilians, under the guise of culture". Feiler rejected charges that their intention was to glorify suicide bombers and accused Mazel of "practicing censorship". He said the installation was made to "call attention to how weak people left alone can be capable of horrible things". Following the incident, Mazel was unrepentant, and said: "I was standing before an exhibit calling for genocide, praising the genocide of me, you, my brothers and sisters."
Read more about this topic: Hanadi Jaradat
Famous quotes containing the words snow, white, madness and/or truth:
“It had been cold since December. Snow fell, first,
At New Year and, from then until April, lay
On everything. Now it had melted, leaving
The gray grass like a pallet, closely pressed;
And dirt. The wind blew in the empty place.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“The Enormous Room seems to me to be the book that has nearest approached the mood of reckless adventure in which men will reach the white heat of imagination needed to fuse the soggy disjointed complexity of the industrial life about us into seething fluid of creation. There can be no more playing safe.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“Fear is cruel and mean. The political reigns of terror have been reigns of madness and malignity,—a total perversion of opinion; society is upside down, and its best men are thought too bad to live.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)