art dubai Archives

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

Art Dubai 2019 – Rana Samara’s War Games

/ Rana Samara (Art Fair) / art dubai, Art Fair, candy crush, contemporary, lego, mackintosh tin, palestinian art, prosthetics, pubg, Rana Samara, sheep's heads, super mario, War Games, zawyeh /

Art Dubai 2019
March 20 – March 23, 2019
Booth C12, Madinat Jumeirah, Dubai

Rana Samara’s War Games takes us to the imaginative worlds of refugee children living in Gaza and elsewhere in the region. Exploring the social and political locked in a child’s dream or rather nightmare, Samara highlights the plight of children in a turbulent region dreaming of fixing their own worlds and being able to simply “play.”

Dispossessed and traumatized by military war and occupations, children living in camps dreaming of far away life were asked by Samara to draw their re-occurring dreams. Unsurprisingly, they illustrated personal stories that revolved predominantly around “play”. Samara translates those drawings on large stretches of canvases using striking bright colors and vivid ornaments as if she is trying to reflect the size and value of life details found in those dreams in her huge scaled, colorful paintings. Prosthetic implants, an empty Mackintosh chocolate tin full of thread coils, huge Lego bricks, and various computer games are a glimpse of what lies behind intimate personal stories into which she delves.

Children dream of games they yearn to play and objects that bring them feelings of safety and comfort within one’s own home and family re-occurs to become part of lifelong memories and influences. It is no wonder that Samara addresses this topic in particular as an adult. For it is her own experience as a child that sparked this project. Samara started this project by drawing “Super Mario”, stemming from her own childhood experience when Israeli soldiers stormed her own home and kicked her and her family out, and ransacked the house. Samara never forgot that they disturbed a “Super Mario” game that she was playing preventing her to complete it and losing a “life” on screen eventually.

While re-occurring dreams reflect trauma and wounds that can leave an indelible mark on adult life, dreaming of playing simply reflects the dire lives of these children born and raised in “transient” homes that become permanently “transitional.” Makeshift structures that house impoverished and densely packed populations of refugees lack the basic infrastructure of services, with no adequate personal space that allows children sufficient room to play.

Samara’s previous project, Intimate Space, explored the intimate and social aspects of living in refugee camps. In War Games, Samara continues this pursuit of bringing fundamental and intimate issues facing refugees into the public realm, unearthing subjects that are rarely explored artistically.