Latest news with #Makhoul
Gulf Today
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Gulf Today
Promises are for never: Bashir Makhoul eyes pledges in Zawyeh Gallery show
Zawyeh Gallery is currently hosting The Promise, a solo exhibition by renowned Palestinian artist Bashir Makhoul. To run till June 30, in The Promise Makhoul unveils his latest works, exploring themes of home, displacement and memory through visual narratives. The exhibition title encapsulates a poetic and ambiguous statement of intent — an assertion that is both an event and its upending. A promise is made and, inevitably, can be broken. The duality is at the heart of Makhoul's practice, where creation and fragmentation, completion and rupture, coexist. At the core of the exhibition is the recurring motif of the house, depicted in its most elemental form: a cube with a door and a window. The geometric structures, arranged in dense and chaotic formations, reflect the overcrowded conditions of refugee camps and marginalised communities. Despite their elegant colour palettes, the artworks reveal a stark contrast between aesthetic beauty and unsettling political realities. An olive tree in close-up. Featuring works in painting, electroplated sculptures, printmaking, handwoven wool and silk tapestries and mixed media works, the art explores identity, fragmentation, dispossession, and longing. Through layered symbols such as home, petals, and patterns, Makhoul examines the fragile balance between loss and hope, chaos and order, destruction and rebirth. Home for him is both a sanctuary and a site of loss. It is not only a place where one builds memories, but also a location where one loses them. Home therefore does not offer only security, but also gives birth to instability and loss, especially if home is a refugee camp. Makhoul explores his relationship with his homeland, examining its emotional and psychological impact. He works between lived reality and nostalgia, presence and displacement, permanence and impermanence. Weaving is just not a skill for him: it is also the reconstruction of memories while electroplated sculptures symbolise disruption. As a Palestinian who has spent most of his life in exile, the notion of home is therefore conflicted. The Palestinian experience of home under occupation is marked by the sense of belonging and also the haunting feel of uncertainty. Among the featured series is Fractured Oblivion, an extension of the artist's earlier Promise series. Scattered blossom petals — once symbols of unity — now encircle dark voids that echo bullet holes Makhoul photographed in Beirut in the 1990s. The colour hides pain. The war-torn surfaces evoke his family's exile during the Nakba, while the petals suggest healing and the voids, as the title implies, lead only to oblivion. The themes of rupture and continuity extend into the Skein series, where tangled threads symbolise exile and return. Works such as Drift and Density (3) explore the Palestinian experience of loss and perseverance, with Density (3) standing as a testament to a fragmented nation bound together by resilience and solidarity. Makhoul's latest experiments in electroplated 3D printing introduce an unexpected crystalline structure inside his house formations. The approach reaches its pinnacle in My Olive Tree, where geometric structures take on the spectral form of an ancient olive tree — a personal symbol for the artist, standing between two parcels of land he does not own. The olive tree, much like the Palestinian people, waits — embodying persistence and the inevitable fulfillment of the promise to return. The Promise offers a powerful meditation on identity, displacement, and resilience, and marks Makhoul's first solo exhibition in Dubai. He was born in 1963 in the village of Makhoul in the Galilee region of Palestine. The artist was only five years old when he and his nine siblings — four sisters and five brothers — lost their father, leaving his mother alone to raise them. He attended school till he was ten, and around the age of 13, began to supplement his schooling with paid work at a carpentry shop to contribute to the household income. It was his boss at this shop who discovered his artistic skills and passion for design; eighteen months after he began, Makhoul was named the manager of the workshop. Following secondary school, he also made violins designed for Arabic music and played them at weddings. In the early 1980s, he began to study fine arts at Haifa University, later relocating to the United Kingdom. In 2017, Makhoul became the first Palestinian Vice-Chancellor at the University for the Creative Arts, UK, cementing his central place in the art world of the Palestinian diaspora. Bashir Makhoul is a Palestinian artist. Exile has significantly impacted Palestinian art, forcing artists to grapple with displacement, identity, and the ongoing struggle for homeland. Palestinian artists have used their work to express the pain of loss, cultivate nostalgia for a lost homeland, and document the tragic experiences of their families and communities. Exile also has led to the development of new artistic mediums and styles, as artists adapt to changed circumstances. notes that the Palestinian experience of exile 'is a multifaceted tapestry woven with threads of longing and resistance. At its core lies the dichotomy between the tangible memories of those who were forced to leave their homeland by Israel's military forces and the inherited narratives passed down to subsequent generations. Throughout their diasporic journey, Palestinians have grappled with the challenge of preserving their heritage and resisting attempts to delegitimise their indigenous connection to the land ... diaspora, far from being a passive state of displacement, emerged as a locus of resistance and cultural resurgence. Artists and writers crafted narratives of resilience, depicting the indomitable spirit of a people determined to resist cultural assimilation and preserve their identity.'
Middle East Eye
26-01-2025
- Politics
- Middle East Eye
Trump says ‘clean out that whole thing' as part of his plan for Gaza
US President Donald Trump has proposed a plan to "just clean out" Gaza and said he wants Egypt and Jordan to take in Palestinians from the territory, where Israel's onslaught has displaced over 90 percent of the population. Trump called Gaza a "demolition site" and said he had spoken to Jordan's King Abdullah II about moving Palestinians out of the territory. "I'd like Egypt to take people. And I'd like Jordan to take people," Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One, adding that he planned to talk to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi on Sunday. "You're talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing," Trump said of Gaza, whose population is about 2.4 million, adding that "something has to happen". The overwhelming majority of Gaza's population has been displaced by Israel's 15-month war, which has devastated much of Gaza and killed over 47,000 people. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters A fragile ceasefire agreement has been in place since 19 January, and on Saturday, Israel and Hamas completed their second captives-prisoners exchange. Hamas released four Israeli female soldiers in exchange for 200 Palestinian prisoners. "I'd rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing at a different location where they can maybe live in peace for a change," Trump said, adding that moving Gaza's inhabitants could be "temporarily or could be long term". Leading Palestinian rights activist Ameer Makhoul said Trump's proposal is part of an American project geared towards "reconstruction and political demographic engineering without camps and an effort to dismantle the ties of the Palestinian people". In the West Bank, Trump is giving Netanyahu a free hand to blow up the region Read More » "When it comes to the Palestinian case, there is no temporary population transfer but rather permanent displacement, as has been the case since 1948 with the refugees and 1967 with the displaced," Makhoul told Middle East Eye. "Trump's talk about the location of the Gaza Strip reveals his intentions to deal with the issue as real estate, as well as an attempt to control the strip and the economic resources, particularly the natural gas in the Gaza sea." Sisi has previously warned against any "forced displacement" of Palestinians from Gaza into Egypt, saying that such a move could put the 1979 peace treaty with Israel at risk. Meanwhile, Jordan is already home to around 2.3 million registered Palestinian refugees, according to the United Nations. "Egypt and Jordan will not accept Trump's proposal because it is a politically unacceptable position and poses a threat to the national security of each of them," Makhoul said. Trump's incoming administration has pledged "unwavering support" for Israel but has not yet outlined a broader Middle East strategy. On Saturday, the US president confirmed that he had directed the Pentagon to approve the delivery of 2,000lb (907kg) bombs to Israel, a shipment previously halted by former President Joe Biden. "We released them today, and they'll have them. They paid for them, and they've been waiting for them for a long time. They've been in storage," Trump told reporters. A single 2,000lb bomb is capable of penetrating dense concrete and metal, causing extensive destruction across a large area.
