Until 30 June 2026, Zawyeh Gallery is hosting Elusive Territories, an exhibition bringing together fifteen Palestinian artists whose practices examine memory, displacement, exile, and the fragile notion of home. The show unfolds as both an artistic and emotional cartography, tracing landscapes that are at once physical, psychological, and historical. The exhibition assembles fragmented perspectives and reveals how personal and collective histories remain deeply intertwined.
The title of the show suggests unstable geographies and shifting borders, but also points toward emotional territories that cannot easily be mapped. The works on display explore how exile reshapes perception and how memory functions as a form of survival. Landscapes appear repeatedly throughout the exhibition, yet they are often transformed into symbolic or abstract spaces. Homeland emerges not as a fixed location, but as something carried internally, reconstructed through recollection, longing, and imagination.
The featured artists include Samia Halaby, who is among the foremost pioneers of Arab abstraction. Her vibrant compositions dissolve conventional representations of landscape into dynamic arrangements of colour and movement. Halaby’s paintings often balance geometric structure with emotional resonance, creating visual rhythms that evoke both memory and motion. In the context of Elusive Territories, her work introduces abstraction as a language capable of expressing displacement while resisting erasure.
The exhibition also presents works by Kamal Boullata, whose practice combined geometric abstraction with Arabic visual traditions. Boullata’s compositions frequently explored spirituality, architecture, and exile through carefully structured forms and luminous colour fields. His work occupies a significant place within modern Palestinian art history, and its inclusion here reinforces the show’s dialogue between artistic experimentation and cultural memory.
Another central figure is Sliman Mansour, who is internationally known for paintings that depict the endurance of Palestinian life, often through symbolic imagery connected to land, labour, and resistance. His artworks retain a powerful human dimension, portraying ordinary figures whose presence becomes an act of persistence. Alongside him, Nabil Anani contributes landscapes and textured compositions rooted in Palestine’s physical terrain. His practice merges natural materials, such as dried seeds, with painted surfaces and thus reinforces the inseparability of identity and land.
A younger generation of artists expands these concerns into new formal territories. Yazan Abu Salameh explores urban geographies in his mixed-media works that often incorporate industrial or everyday materials, for example, wires and Lego blocks. Meditations on precarity and survival, his art pieces reflect the vulnerability of shelter and domestic space. Meanwhile, Mohammed Joha examines memory, displacement, and survival through layered compositions that combine painting and collage. Featuring discarded materials, such as fabric, cardboard, and plastic, they evoke fractured memories and interrupted histories.
Also on view are works by Bashir Makhoul, whose densely repetitive structures reference architecture, migration, and overcrowded urban environments. Makhoul’s practice investigates what it means to remain emotionally connected to a homeland while living in exile. Similarly, Hosni Radwan reflects on displacement through expressive paintings shaped by decades of movement across different geographies.
Artists Rana Samara and Ruba Salameh approach questions of identity and representation through highly personal visual languages. Their artworks often shift between intimacy and political commentary; they reveal how everyday experiences become inseparable from broader historical realities. The exhibition also showcases contributions from Tayseer Barakat, whose practice is inspired by Palestinian artistic heritage and ancient cultural traditions, alongside acclaimed artist, curator, and writer Khaled Hourani, recognised for his significant contribution to the development and international visibility of contemporary Palestinian art.Also featured are Samir Salameh, known for his expressive paintings distinguished by vivid colours; Vera Tamari, who specialises in clay relief sculpture and conceptual art; and Benji Boyadgian, whose paintings are built through processes of repetition and transformation of patterns.
What makes Elusive Territories especially compelling is its refusal to reduce Palestinian artistic practice to a single visual language or political statement. Instead, the exhibition demonstrates the diversity and complexity of contemporary Palestinian art, showing how artists continue to negotiate histories of displacement.
At the same time, the show remains deeply connected to the present political moment. The works resonate with ongoing realities of dispossession and exile across the region, yet they also insist on the persistence of imagination, memory, and cultural continuity. Rather than functioning solely as documents of loss, the artworks create spaces for reflection, resilience, and even moments of beauty. As several of the participating artists suggest, art itself becomes a territory: one capable of preserving histories, sustaining emotional connection, and imagining futures beyond violence and fragmentation.
To get more information about Elusive Territories, please go to the official web page of the exhibition.
In addition, you might be interested in visiting Observers of Change and Time the Destroyer Is Time the Preserver by Jorge Tacla.
