Young Palestinian artist Rana Samara presents her solo exhibition, Inner Sanctuary, at Zawyeh Gallery in Dubai. The exhibition is an investigation of the artist’s intimate space from an emotional perspective. The exhibition features large paintings as well as small ones. The exhibition is open to visitors until the 28th of August, 2022.
Exploring her personal space such as her colourful bedroom, the corners in her favourite café and other familiar places, Samara uses fine details including daily objects and furnishing to picture her world. She creates her artworks using her signature pleasant colours and amazing decorative motifs. With these colours, motifs, and shapes, the artist conveys her sentiments showing her content, calmness, anxiety, or frustration. Sometimes her art is full of lovely motifs and sometimes it is fragile and colourless. In some paintings, she uses sharp and edgy squares, which increase a worrying feeling.
At the same time, she does not picture humans in her art except for one art piece. For the artist, it seems that not humans are essential but their evidence is. Therefore, in the paintings, there is a some focus on their traces. For example, there is a suit hanging over closed curtains in a bedroom, a slipper in the middle of the kitchen floor, plates and food left on them in another kitchen.
Rana Samara is a Palestinian artist born in Jerusalem. In the previous project, Intimate Space, she investigated societal norms, sexuality, gender roles and other factors of daily lives of women staying in overcrowded refugee camps and rural communities in Palestine. The artist has participated in several exhibitions and art fairs including Contemporary Istanbul (2019), Art Dubai (2017 and 2019) and Beirut Art Fair (2017).
Zawyeh Gallery is an independent Visual Art Gallery founded in Ramallah, Palestine, in 2013. Since March 2020, the gallery has expanded by opening in a second location at Alserkal Avenue in Dubai, UAE.
To learn more, please visit the official webpage of the exhibition.
You may be also interested in visiting The Sown Seed, a group exhibition by seven artists from Ghana, Mali and Kenya.
