Playing Hooky in Amman, in search of art

The tour I signed on to is great, really great. But once in a while, I need a day to myself. I had planned to have a day in Damascus, according to our original plan, but plans changed. So, since we had an extra day in Jordan, I decided to take myself out to find some contemporary art.
I asked our lecturer about what he knew, and it turned out that he knew a lot. He has spend quite a bit of time in Amman and had some great suggestions.Samhir, our country guide, was also helpful and wrote out the name of where I was going first in arabic, so I could so the taxi driver.
The best part of the day was sleeping till 8am! After day after day of 6 or 6:15 am wake-ups, the luxury of sleeping until I woke up, and not rushing out the door was totally wonderful! I was the last person to leave the breakfast room at the hotel, and that was fine with me.
The first taxi took me to the National Gallery of Art, two buildings facing each other across a small park that has lots of sculptures in it. It’s in a charming neighborhood of older, 1920′s and 30′s homes that used to be the most desirable area of Amman. Now it is still nice, but not “trendy”.I walked in to the quiet museum, and found only one other visitor.
The ground floor has mostly paintings on canvas and sculptures. The second floor has mostly works on paper, some sculpture, and some older paintings. Work by contemporary artists from all over the arab world is the focus of the collection. I noted artists from Jordan,Syria, Iraq,Lebanon,Palestine, and Egypt. Just on the first floor. I took photos of some pieces, which I will include with this posting. I found the work to be exciting, thoughtful and current.
After exploring both buildings, I headed out to another location a sort of community for artists called “Darat al Funun”, or little houses of art, something like that. My taxi driver wasn’t sure where it was, despite my attempts to explain. We got close, but Amman is a very difficult place to navigate. It is built on quite a few steep hills and neighborhoods are focused on a particular hill. In between the neighborhoods are valleys which sometimes are open space, sometimes full of houses and businesses. Moving between areas requires a lot of back and forth. The neighborhood’s streets seem to go in circles as they wind around hill tops, and streets can be difficult to locate.
The driver opened his window to ask a guy if he knew the place I wanted to go, he did, and climbed into the front passenger seat, and off we went. They let me off at the bottom of a series of stairways leading up 3 or 4 stories to the Darat al Funun back patio. I paid the driver and offered a tip to the “helper” but he refused. I said “Shukran” and headed up the steps.
I found my way into two video installations, both rather humorous. The first was a video inspired by hard bread the artist was served in Egypt. The large rounds of typical arabic bread were so hard that all he could imagine doing with them,was tapping them musically. The video shows 4 musicians, dressed formally in black suits. sitting in a row, “playing” the breads and making music. They are taking the process very seriously, and one does, too, when watching the video. The other was about young boys training to be barbers. They have to practice shaving balloons, which explode when nicked! Poor boys!
I went back outside to find out what else was in this place, when two youngish men came up the stairs and starting talking with an older man who had directed me to the videos. I asked if they were artists, and whether they had studios here. One said, yes, he was an artist, and his studio was nearby. I thought he meant in a part of the complex and was very happy to follow him. Instead, we walked back down the flights of stairs I’d only recently come up, crossed the street, went down more stairs, more stairs and into the terrace of a building. He unlocked the door and showed me some of his recent paintings. He is a poet and caligrapher and painter – and he incorporates all three elements in some of his work – the ones I liked best. His name was Muhammed, and his english was surprisingly bad for a guy his age, I thought. Still, he was really nice and after we looked at his work, he walked me over to another large private gallery very near by. In this lovely space, the new work of an Iraqi born artist was shown. I eventually ended up in a conversation with the owner, a woman, whose son had worked at the San Francisco Fairmont Hotel. She loves my hometown! After some chat, she gave me a book that she had published about a Palestinian naive artist who she represents.
I left, heading for Jebel Amman, a neighborhood, and Rainbo Street. This turned out to be the locus of the young and hip, student types and young professionals in Amman. Coffee shops, bakeries, bookstores. I found a small restaurant and had a small chicken sandwich and tea and enjoyed people watching for nearly an hour. Then I headed towards another gallery a few blocks away, that was supposed to open at 4pm. I arrived at the door at 4:15, but there was no sign of anyone. Rather than wait, I chose to check out Books@Cafe, just down the street. The ground floor is a bookstore,with both English and Arabic books. Upstairs is a cafe featuring american food. And a free computer! ( with a really slow connection) I check my email,the news headlines, and then settled in for a cup of tea and a piece of carrot cake. The waiter was a young man, who only had worked there for about 3 weeks, but seemed to be making a difference. Turns out he had worked as a pastry chef in Texas, and the owner wants him to help figure out how to make better american style desserts. I told him that the carrot cake was dry and needed more spice. He agreed and was looking forward to working on it!
I found another taxi to take me to the Petra National Trust office to meet up with my tour group. We learned a lot about how Petra is being preserved and explored, then headed back to the hotel for a quick change for dinner.
I was fine, but the rest of the group had been out since 7:30 that morning, and were given 30 mins to change and be back on the bus for dinner at one of Amman’s nicest restaurants. Whew! I was go glad that I’d had my “day out”.
Karen

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