Curated by Mahmoud Abu Hashhash

A Boy with a VHS, Acrylic on Canvas, 100 x 140 cm, 2013.

Behind every work, there’s a semantically laden image, capturing a critical moment in contemporary Palestinian history. Some mysterious impulse urged me to work on these images, starting from the here and now. Yet every time I faced these images, I realised that a strange feeling took hold of me, wanting to reconstruct the moment that is captured by each image, or rather to reanimate it. I simply could not submit to merely looking at it, without letting some deep urge to “vandalise”, or what seems like it, to have its way throughout its reproduction.

Perhaps my “vandalistic” intrusions are all I wanted to say in this piece. Perhaps it is nothing but the melancholia of an individual facing a history that is imbued with meaning, trying to find an aesthetic outlet for it through tampering with the appearance of history, in a time where meaning is lost.

  Arafat on the cover of the TIME magazine, 1968.

  Arafat on the cover of the TIME magazine, 2002.

 

Arafat 1968, Kuffiyeh on canvas, 6 Editions, 100 x 100 cm, 2014.

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Arafat 2002, Kuffiyeh on canvas, 6 Editions, 100 x 100 cm, 2014.

 

The Ship, Acrylic on Canvas, 100 x 140 cm, 2013.

 

Golden Frame, Acrylic on Canvas, 140 x 100 cm, 2013.