MENA ART FAIR 2025

Zawyeh Gallery is pleased to participate in the 2025 edition of MENA Art Fair Paris, presenting A Passage to Palestine, an exhibition bringing together the works of six Palestinian artists: Bashir Makhoul, Hosni Radwan, Maisara Baroud, Mohammed Joha, Nabil Anani, and Sliman Mansour. The exhibition reflects on ideas of home, memory, and resilience through the lens of artists whose practices are rooted in the land and shaped by displacement and endurance. Each artist offers a distinct visual language that speaks to belonging and continuity amid fragmentation.

In his recent series, Bashir Makhoul constructs poetic architectures of exile. Through geometric formations, threads, and delicate layers, he transforms the notion of home into a metaphor of persistence, weaving together memory and the longing to return. Hosni Radwan captures the city of Jerusalem with its arches, domes, and stone facades, painting it as a city of paradoxes, sacred and violated, intimate yet distant, always alive in the imagination. Sliman Mansour continues his exploration of identity through earth and pigment, using mud and straw to form tactile mosaics that echo the patterns of Palestinian embroidery and reaffirm the inseparable bond between land, culture, and endurance.

In Nabil Anani’s The Land and I, the artist reimagines Palestine through natural materials such as straw and dried seeds, presenting the landscape as both subject and spirit. His vision of an unbroken, living land turns painting into an act of reclamation and belonging. Mohammed Joha’s collaged works rebuild memory from fragments of paper, fabric, and debris, reflecting on houselessness as a condition of resilience. Within the ruins, color and pattern endure as quiet signs of life. Maisara Baroud’s black-and-white drawings, created in Gaza under genocide, serve as a diary of loss and survival. His lines carry both fragility and defiance, an assertion of life that resists disappearance.

Together, these six artists create a passage through which the land, the body, and the imagination converge. A Passage to Palestine becomes a journey across memory and resilience, an affirmation that art, even in the face of erasure, remains a space of continuity and hope.