Editions: Art and Design

Zawyeh Gallery is pleased to participate in Editions Dubai 2025 with new and recent works by young Palestinian artists Mahmoud Alhaj, Yazan Abu Salameh, Saher Nassar, and Benji Boyadgian. Through distinct visual languages, the four artists reflect on questions of place, memory, and resilience, exploring how personal and collective experiences are shaped by displacement, confinement, and the longing for home.

Mahmoud Alhaj’s projects examine the technologies of violence and control imposed on Palestinian landscapes over decades. Drawing from years of research and image archives, works such as Violence 24/7, Fragile, and 402 of Gray investigate the visual residue of colonial domination. From the separation wall to military zones and degraded urban spaces, Alhaj reworks found images through digital layering, exposing how architecture and infrastructure are weaponised. His practice offers a forensic reading of how daily life in Gaza and beyond is shaped by invisible systems of control, long before the recent escalation of violence. His work resists sensationalism, instead slowing down time to highlight overlooked or forgotten details, offering a haunting, meditative look at sustained trauma.

Yazan Abu Salameh, by contrast, offers a more intimate and metaphorical approach. His recent works use cardboard and ink to depict tightly packed buildings boxed within concrete walls. Towering suns, brilliant, burning, and overwhelming, loom over these scenes. The sun becomes both a symbol of hope and a harsh, unrelenting force. The interaction between grey concrete and vivid orange hues evokes the tension between stagnation and aspiration, between entrapment and the human instinct to reach for light.

Saher Nassar’s The Eternal is a tribute to Palestinian caricaturist Naji al-Ali, celebrating his bravery and uncompromising freedom of expression. Known for his relentless criticism of both enemies and allies, Naji’s defiant voice cost him his life when he was assassinated in London in 1987. His most enduring creation, the character of Handala, a child frozen at the age of exile, with his back turned to the world, has become an enduring emblem of resistance and outrage in the face of injustice. In Nassar’s interpretation, Handala is reimagined with one half mortal and the other half eternal, a powerful reminder that while the artist may have been silenced, his spirit and message continue to live on.

Benji Boyadgian’s work investigates the layers of history embedded within material surfaces. His long-term project Discord, from which the two watercolour works Disoriented Disposition (2020) are derived, explores the tile as both subject and metaphor. Through delicate washes of colour, Boyadgian examines how surfaces carry traces of geological and human temporality, eroding and accumulating over time. By dissecting the histories and fictions embedded in these patterned fragments, he exposes the entropy and transformation born of industrial and cultural processes. His practice becomes an act of excavation, unearthing discordant narratives that lie beneath the visible, revealing how memory, time, and material converge in layered, shifting sediment.

Together, Alhaj, Abu Salameh, Nassar, and Boyadgian present a layered narrative of Palestinian experience where memory, architecture, displacement, and resistance intersect. Their works speak urgently to the present moment, offering a powerful visual statement rooted in place, history, and the struggle for freedom.