A short review does ill-justice to a place so dense in ancient and recent histories; histories that so complicate the present and, one guesses, the future; a place that is so often news-worthy but reduces us all to helpless spectators. With a group of friends the painter Cliff Hanley visited Palestine in 2002. In this Biblical land one expects his story to be full of rich sights and awesome wonders, but this is a much more prosaic and secular sojourn. One of his first sights on a journey to Bethlehem is indeed on a monumental scale, but it is not what one expects. Not a church or a significant ancient building, instead he is faced with a ten-foot high turnstile commemorating the time before the Palestinian Authority took it over.

Hanley's dense and highly personal text is strewn with such incongruent images, drawn from glimpses of refugee camps and battered communities. It is a tale of checkpoints and curfews, of interrogations and interruptions, some rather sudden and scary such as the time when Hanley is talking to a director of an institute that publishes oral histories only to be interrupted twice by nearby explosions.

This rich pamphlet is illustrated - in full colour - by a series of bold paintings. All rendered in Hanley's inimitable saturated colouration, they capture a Palestine that is both quirky and disquieted. A gentleman gazing at a stray rooster in a painting entitled 'It's a Man Thing', seems innocent were it not for the troupe of ominous figures in the mid-distance - they forming an uncomfortable silhouette looming over the horizon. Hanley aims to capture the warmth of the Palestinian hospitality he enjoyed on his visit; that is clear from the sympathetic treatment of the many individuals who are so clearly rendered in the paintings, just as they are geographically locked in by walls, perimeters and turnstiles. Although the two children in his painting 'Going Home' are moving left out of the picture frame they seem to be suspended there, hemmed in by a wall with the graffiti 'STOP' daubed across it; the turquoise sky is but a thinksliver of colour jammed in at the top of the canvas.