Pen Pal Project

Years: 1997-1999

Location: Israel, Palestinian Authority

Exhibitions: Israel, Palestinian Authority, Jewish Museum Berlin, Jewish Museum of Australia, New York Jewish Film Festival

Assistant: Eldad Cidor

Volunteers: Ofri Zuta, Sigal Lotan

The project was produced in collaboration with Mohamed Judah from the Palestinian Peace Movement and with generous support from the People to People organization in Norway.

I initiated and produced a project that comprised the exchange of photographs and personal correspondence between Palestinian and Israeli youth. We distributed disposable cameras to 500 young people who took pictures of their surroundings, to create a kind of self-portrait of themselves and their worlds. Later, we collected the cameras and printed postcards from the photographs they contained. The participants received a packet of postcards of their pictures, stamped and addressed to a pen pal who was chosen based on a questionnaire they had previously filled out. The pen pals corresponded through photographs and text for about two years, and the project was featured widely in the press in Israel and abroad. It developed into an exhibition that was held in Israel, in the Palestinian Authority, at the Jewish Museum Berlin, and at the Jewish Museum of Australia and included a catalogue in English, Arabic and Hebrew, and another in English and German.

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The Pen Pal project developed into an exhibition that was held in 1999, during which many of the participants met face-to-face for the first time. The period in which the project emerged was an optimistic one, when many Israelis and Palestinians felt that there was a real possibility of a peace agreement. I realized that I didn’t know even one Palestinian who was involved in endeavors similar to mine, and I had only superficial relations with Palestinians who worked in construction in the area where I was living. If peace was at hand, I thought, we had the opportunity to enable the younger generation of Israelis and Palestinians to make personal connections, rather than perceive each other via the distorted accounts of the media. During that period, I had many dreams in which the difficult prevailing reality merged with my childhood, as the son of Arabic-speaking parents, and I related to these dreams in the introduction to the catalogue that accompanied the exhibition at the Jewish Museum Berlin.

I realize now that the project had tremendous influence on my personal path as an artist and as a person. I am still inspired by the knowledge that the creative process can be experienced actively by the members of a community, in a space beyond the gallery or the museum, and in a manner which can lead to significant change.

Samar Hazboun & Lynn Polyak at the Opening of the exhibition, Jewish museum, Berlin, 2002