Until 9 November 2025, Zawyeh Gallery in Dubai is hosting Refined Compositions, an exhibition featuring striking abstract works by Palestinian artist Ruba Salameh. In this body of work, Salameh grapples with the most urgent questions: How does one make art in the face of ongoing catastrophe? How do memory, identity, mourning, and resistance take shape in visual form when violence unfolds in real time?
In the art pieces on view, Salameh engages with symbols such as the Palestinian flag. Rather than depicting it directly, she reimagines its palette and distils its colours into layered abstractions that carry traces of hope and censorship, resistance and grief. Among the recurring motifs are ants, tiny, nearly invisible marks that wander across the canvas. These forms suggest both labour and rootedness, everyday endurance and communal survival. At the same time, they hint at contamination, fragility, and invasion.
Salameh places her practice in dialogue with an earlier generation of Palestinian artists, most notably the late art historian and painter Kamal Boullata, referencing his Homage to the Flag (1995). Through this conversation, she traces a visual lineage in which symbols of identity (colours, forms, and signs) have been banned, suppressed, and continually reclaimed.
The exhibited artworks embody the emotional terrain of displacement, loss, and resistance. Through abstraction, Salameh creates a space where grief, hope, and memory coexist; where symbols are not static but alive; where even the smallest details, such as an erased gesture or a drifting ant, are imbued with meaning. The exhibition becomes an assertion of persistence: of identity, cultural memory, and visual language in the face of erasure.
About the artist
Ruba Salameh (b. 1985, Nazareth), who resides in Berlin (Germany), received BA and MFA degrees in Fine Arts from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design (Jerusalem). Her multidisciplinary practice involves painting, video, photography, and collage, with a recent focus on abstraction through layering, repetition, erasure, and geometric structuring. Influenced by early modernist movements such as Bauhaus, Russian Constructivism, and De Stijl, she has developed a distinctive visual language rooted in themes of memory, identity, and displacement.
Salameh has showcased her works internationally in various exhibitions, such as Cipher (Gazelli Art House, London, UK, 2024); Beyond Home: A Feminist Deconstruction (Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin, 2023); Art Dubai (2023 and 2021); Tensegrity (solo) (Zawyeh Gallery, Dubai, 2020); and The Gift Art Fair 2016 (Al Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art, Jerusalem, 2016).
To get more information about Refined Compositions, please go to the official web page of the exhibition.
In addition, you may be interested in visiting New Western Views (Preview) by Marwan Bassiouni.
To stay connected with the latest art news, you can follow our Telegram channel.
