Sliman Mansour (Art Fair)

Art Dubai 2020

/ Khaled Hourani (Art Fair), Sliman Mansour (Art Fair), Wafa Hourani (Art Fair) / art dubai, Art Dubai 2020, Art Fair, Khaled Hourani, Sliman Mansour, Wafa Hourani /

March 25 – March 28, 2020
Booth E6, Madinat Jumeirah, Dubai, UAE

Zawyeh Gallery participates this year in Art Dubai, with the artworks of two Palestinian artists: Khaled Hourani and Sliman Mansour. The artworks examine different manifestations of concepts of confinement, borders, and connection in Palestine.

Khaled Hourani participates with works from his early project, “Picasso in Palestine,” which was organized in cooperation with the Van Abbemuseum. While, his “Picasso in Palestine #3” (oil on canvas), is a recreation of a photo of Picasso’s Buste de Femme (1943), exhibited in Ramallah in 2011, which appears with a Palestinian security guard. His “Picasso in Palestine, New York, 10013 291 Church Street” (Photography), is a reproduction of several layers of “photos of photos\” of guards wearing several national customs guarding eventually a previous photo of the original Picasso painting displayed on the exhibition wall in Ramallah. In the third artwork, a special focus is given to the process of shipping the precious artwork with a touch of sarcasm. In his project Picasso in Palestine, Khaled Hourani originally questioned a complicated loan procedure and endless negotiations between different parties in order to display a famous painting in the exceptionally confined nature of the Palestinian reality. The project took new dimensions as it developed at a later stage when the new reproductions delved further into examining the relationship between art and power.

In Sliman Mansour’s artworks, the combination of areas painted in acrylic colors and areas of cracked mud is focal. This combination of two contrasting materials emphasizes the tension between the roughness of the mud cracks which is dominant, and the contrasting adjacent areas of smoothly painted acrylic colors. Mansour’s paintings could be a representation of the stalemate situation in the Palestinian current reality and the changes that permeate the nature of Palestinians as people. His figures as if transforming slowly and discretely from being colorful and vibrant into disintegrated and fragmented characters broken into colorless pieces. Yet, its not all dim and gloomy, his “Temporary Escape” gives some hope that this transformation is only transient.

: Khaled Hourani, Picasso in Palestine #2, 2019, oil on canvas, 125 x 170 cm

: Khaled Hourani, Picasso in Palestine #3, 2019, oil on canvas, 142 x 110 cm

: Sliman Mansour, Survival, (2018) mud on wood, 120 x 120 cm

: Sliman Mansour, Absent Presence II, 2019, mud and acrylic on wood, 140 x 100 cm

Abu Dhabi Art 2019

/ Khaled Hourani (Art Fair), Nabil Anani (Art Fair), Sliman Mansour (Art Fair), Tayseer Barakat (Art Fair), Wafa Hourani (Art Fair) / Abu Dhabi Art, Art Fair, Khaled Hourani, Nabil Anani, Sliman Mansour, Wafa Hourani /

November 21 – November 23, 2019
Booth S15, Manarat Al Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi

Zawyeh Gallery participates in Abu Dhabi Art 2019, with distinctive old and new artworks representing five renowned Palestinian artists: Khaled Hourani, Nabil Anani, Sliman Mansour, and Tayseer Barakat. Across the spectrum, the artists use a wealth of materials and represent a variety of styles, examining an array of subjects that stem from Palestinian reality.

Khaled Hourani participates with two pieces from his early project “Picasso in Palestine,” which was organized in cooperation with the Van Abbe Museum. While his “Picasso in Palestine, 2019” (acrylic on canvas), is a recreation of a photo of Picasso’s Buste de Femme (1943), exhibited in Ramallah in 2011, which appears with two Palestinian guards. His “Picasso in Palestine 2019, installation view: catastrophe and the power of art, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo” (Photography), is a reproduction of several layers of “photos of photos\” of guards wearing several national customs guarding eventually a previous photo of the original Picasso painting displayed on the exhibition wall in Ramallah. In his project Picasso in Palestine, Khaled Hourani originally questioned a complicated loan procedure and endless negotiations between different parties in order to display a famous painting in the exceptional nature of Palestinian reality. The project took new dimensions as it developed at a later stage when the new reproductions delved further into examining the relationship between art and power.

On the other hand, Nabil Anani, introduces new materials in his series “Olive Groves”, using natural desiccated plants, straw, and mixed media. His artworks capture an empty semi-arid landscape in which plants grow scarcely while olive trees thrive. The scenery of olive groves spreading over the horizon through the Palestinian landscape reflects the sturdy nature of this plant that remains rooted in the earth despite adversities.

Natural materials are also focal in Sliman Mansour’s artworks. The combination of mud and acrylic on wood reflects the tension between the rough cracks of mud which is dominant, in contrast to adjacent areas of smoothly painted acrylic colors. Mansour’s paintings represent the stalemate situation in the Palestinian current reality and the subsequent changes that permeate the nature of Palestinians as people. They suggest a slow transformation of colorful, vibrant figures into disintegrating characters broken into many colorless pieces. Yet, it is not all dim and gloomy, his “Temporary Escape” gives some hope that this transformation is only transient.

Tayseer Barakat‘s wooden work reminds us of early cave drawings. Animals, abstract figures, and alphabet-like symbols are all executed using wood-burning tools. His works represent a past phase from the nineties, in which the artist primarily examined details of his personal life in Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza as if writing a prolonged detailed memoir.

: Nabil Anani, Olive Groves #2, 2019, mixed media on canvas, 100 × 112 cm

: Nabil Anani, Olive Groves #1 (2019), mixed media on canvas, 112 x 100 cm

: Khaled Hourani, Picasso in Palestine, 2019, photography (edition 1/1), 80 x 120 cm

: Khaled Hourani, Picasso in Palestine, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 122 x 152 cm

: Tayseer Barakat, Untitled, 1982, wood burning (pyrography) 82 x 80 cm

: Tayseer Barakat, Untitled, 1996, wood burning (pyrography) 89 x 70 cm

: Sliman Mansour, Temporary Escape, 2019, mud and acrylic on wood, 110 x 110 cm

: Sliman Mansour, Holy Land, 2019, mud and acrylic on wood, 110 x 100 cm

Visualizing Palestine: An Intimate Portrait of a Land | Abu Dhabi Art 2018

/ Nabil Anani (Art Fair), Sliman Mansour (Art Fair) / Abu Dhabi Art 2018, An Intimate Portrait of a Land, Art Fair, Nabil Anani, Sliman Mansour, Visualizing Palestine /

November 14 – November 17, 2018 Manarat Al Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi

Zawyeh Gallery presents ‘ Visualizing Palestine: An Intimate Portrait of a Land ‘, an exhibition of selected works by two of Palestine’s most significant and senior artists, Nabil Anani and Sliman Mansour. Both primarily painters have played a crucial role in defining modern art in Palestine. Their works are a repository of images of the Palestinian experience, but particularly of the landscape as reimagined and revisualised through both artists’ intimate knowledge of its stories, history and the contemporary devastations visited upon it. Their timeless images evoke the specific geography of this place while telling us about the occupation that has redesigned its borders and contours. In vibrant colours and with bold, emphatic drawing, both artists render a vivid experience in paint of the specific Palestinian geography with its iconic and ancient olive trees, the traditional stone houses of the villages built into the terraced hillsides, and some of the more modern manifestations of ‘home’: the refugee camps now similarly embedded in the Palestinian topography.

Their works also portray the people whose lives are intimately connected to the land, to its subtle modulations of light and shadow, the daily sunrises and sunsets and the seasonal rhythms. The men, women and children who have lived and worked on this land have strived to preserve its cultural heritage and protect it from theft and appropriation. Symbolic, yet crucial, images—the olive groves and their harvest, the nurturing maternal figure in traditional dress, the refugee with only the simple garment she stands up in, images in photographs of those who have gone before who gave their lives for freedom fill these paintings by two artists who have made such an important contribution to Palestine’s visualisation of itself. Nabil Anani and Sliman Mansour are both seminal figures in the history of art in Palestine. Members of the New Visions group of artists formed in the First Intifada, they used non-traditional art materials such as earth and leather in multimedia and assemblage works as a means of boycotting traditional paint and canvas that came from Israeli suppliers and protesting against the violence of the occupation. They are the two most influential artists in the history of modern Palestinian visual arts, whose lives and work have been concurrent with the timescale of events in Palestine and who have articulated and envisioned that legacy in the powerful works of art this exhibition presents for the first time to the audience at Abu Dhabi Art.