Cohabiting with conflict: Colin Davidson's 12 faces of Jerusalem

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jun/16/colin-davidson-jerusalem-portraits-dublin

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Jerusalem: the word rings like a gong. This divided city has been coveted by worldly powers for millennia – and by the three Abrahamic faiths, whose great shrines nestle inside the Old City like antagonistic magnets. Modern west Jerusalem is a sprawling metropolis. East Jerusalem, home to those shrines and most of the city's 350,000 Palestinian Arabs, is occupied territory under international law, claimed by the Palestinians as their capital, yet patrolled by heavily armed Israeli soldiers. Slicing through it is the separation wall, which physically excludes an estimated 55,000 Palestinians from the city centre.

It seems an extraordinary place from which to distil a hope in common humanity, yet this is the appeal behind an ambitious collaboration between Belfast artist Colin Davidson and his Dublin gallerist, Oliver Sears, who travelled through the city to portray a biblical total of 12 Jerusalemites.

Davidson, born in 1968 into a Protestant community in south Belfast, is a genial if cautious presence, president of the Royal Ulster Academy since 2012. He has painted many fine bird's-eye views of Belfast (occasionally featuring its peace wall, which weaves along sectarian interfaces), before embarking on his award-winning monumental portraits of friends, musicians, actors and writers such as Seamus Heaney. In 2012, his show at Belfast's Lyric theatre became the backdrop for the first private handshake between the Queen and Martin McGuinness, after which Davidson talked the unlikely couple around his exhibition.

Sears, meanwhile, lost a grandfather and countless members of his extended family to the Holocaust. His mother, who was flung from a train bound for Auschwitz in 1943, has published a peculiarly enchanted child's memoir of those days, and Sears himself has written many haunting vignettes of his family history.

Davidson is a gifted and accomplished painter: sharply realist, quite academic, yet highly expressive. There is a rough-hewn psychology to his likenesses – not a million miles from Lucian Freud, with their often flayed, anatomical look.

Here, Sears and Davidson shy away from politics or stated history: each painting is titled only by the sitter's first name. In a catalogue essay, Philippe Sands QC, the international human-rights lawyer, frames the principle in terms of the United Nations Charter of April 1945, which affirmed "the dignity and worth of the human person". But the sitters' identities are no secret, and under the surface their political views crackle. One, a devout peacenik, almost pulled out once he learned of the involvement of the mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat. Another, German-born Robert Aumann, a maths professor at the Hebrew University, bagged the 2005 Nobel prize in economics for his work on game theory, which models situations involving competing interests and has been applied to conflicts ranging from segregated populations to wars of attrition. Linking Aumann's work to his hawkish attitude towards Palestinians, 1,000 academics worldwide, including many Israelis, signed a petition protesting against his prize. Aumann appears here as a rueful Methuselah; it's chastening to realise he lost a son in the 1982 Israeli invasion of south Lebanon.

Other subjects are Arabs: the wistful melancholy of Samer, a hotel worker; or the aristocratic fugue of Halima, a doctor. There are Christians, long drawn to the streets trodden by Jesus's feet: the charmed serenity of Veronica, a young Catholic doctor from Costa Rica; Joyce, an Armenian evangelical looking skyward as though beholding a vision; and the abbot of the Dormition monastery on Mount Zion, Gregory Collins, coincidentally from Belfast's Falls Road.

Shadows of history flicker across other Israeli portraits: the radiant moon-face of Lia van Leer, a nonagenarian giant of Israeli cinema, evacuated to Palestine in 1940, her family later extinguished in a Transnistrian concentration camp; or the dignified Uri Orlev, a children's author, some of whose books relate in compelling simplicity a child's experience of Nazi-occupied Europe. After escaping the Warsaw ghetto, he and his brother endured two years in Bergen-Belsen until its liberation in April 1945.

Orlev's wife Ya'ara now works with the charity Checkpoint, bringing Palestinians across border posts to Israeli hospitals, while another sitter, anaesthetist Yael Stein, works with Arab charities helping Syrian refugees. Meanwhile, Amiram Goldblum, a professor and drug designer at the Hebrew University, was a longtime Peace Now spokesman against illegal Israeli settlements, and still campaigns against apartheid tendencies in Israeli policy. He made the commitment as a platoon commander during the 1973 Yom Kippur war, looking up into the faces of Libyan fighter pilots as they strafed his position in the Sinai.

Across the separation barrier at the Arab Al-Quds University, Amiram's former student and co-worker, Palestinian chemist Yousef Najajreh, is dean of scientific research. Born just before the 1967 war, he has seen the mushrooming of a broad belt of settlements ringing east Jerusalem, and eating into the West Bank where he lives in Beit Jala. His own house has been hit by stray bullets in nightly firefights with the nearby settlement of Gilo. Despite his collaborations with Israeli scientists, Najajreh has no permit to drive into Jerusalem, and on his daily bus journeys he faces the vexations experienced by most Palestinians: stopped on sight at overcrowded Israel Defense Forces checkpoints and barrier crossings, and subjected to endless ID checks, searches and body scans.

While Najajreh aches for recognition of his scientific work, he says he was moved to be included in this exhibition "because my life is associated with Jerusalem. This is among the few situations where people of different nationalities, religions, affiliations are treated as equal: young equal to old, females to male, Jews, Christians and Muslims, occupied and occupier, Israelis and Palestinians." However, he adds, "In a way, it is just an illusory scene. None of us is really equal. Behind this equality, there is a lot of conflicted history and geography."

• Jerusalem is at the Oliver Sears Gallery, Dublin, until 26 June.