Zawyeh Gallery is proud to present the first Dubai exhibition dedicated to internationally renowned Palestinian artist Bashir Makhoul. In this exhibition, Makhoul unveils his latest works, consolidating the themes and material explorations that define his practice.

The title The Promise encapsulates a poetic and ambiguous statement of intent, an assertion that is both an event and a transformation. A promise is made and, inevitably, can be broken. This duality speaks to the essence of Makhoul’s work: the interplay between creation and fragmentation, completion and rupture. His artistic practice engages deeply with the concept of home, a word that, for many, signifies comfort, safety, and identity, yet for displaced communities like the Palestinians, evokes loss, fragmentation, dispossession, and longing.

At the heart of this exploration is the recurring motif of the house, depicted in its most elemental form: a cube with a door and a window. These geometric structures, arranged in dense, chaotic formations, mirror the overcrowded conditions of refugee camps and marginalized communities. Despite their elegant color palettes, they convey an unsettling contrast between aesthetic beauty and unsettling political realities.

This dynamic is powerfully present in the Fractured Oblivion series. These paintings extend his earlier Promise series, where scattered blossom petals, once symbols of unity, now surround dark voids, echoing bullet holes Makhoul photographed in Beirut in the 1990s. The war-torn surfaces evoke his family’s exile during the Nakba and the scars of history. While the petals suggest healing, the black voids, as the title implies, lead to oblivion.

The wounds resurface in Deep Wounds, a series of painted wooden sculptures where carved voids disrupt the illusion of wholeness. These wounds are not just marks of trauma but also spaces of beginnings, resonating with Edward Said’s notion of origins as an act of cutting open, a rupture that invites multiple directions.

The theme of rupture and continuity extends into the Skein series, where Makhoul employs threads as a metaphor for exile and return. In woven works such as Drift and the monumental Density (3), tangled threads speak to the Palestinian experience of loss and perseverance. Density (3), in particular, stands as a testament to a fragmented nation bound together by resilience and solidarity.

Makhoul’s house formations remain a core element of his work. In The Promise, his latest experiments in electroplated 3D printing reveal an unexpected crystalline structure within these human-made arrangements. Here, machine-generated architectures paradoxically resemble organic formations. This concept reaches its pinnacle in My Olive Tree, where the geometric structures take on the spectral form of an ancient olive tree, Makhoul’s own, standing between two parcels of land he does not own. The tree, a silent witness to shifting geographies, embodies both personal and collective endurance.

The olive tree, like the Palestinian people, waits. It stands as a symbol of persistence, bound to the inevitable fulfillment of the promise to return.