Literature

Landscape series, 2025 Charcoal on paper, 21 × 29.7 cm each

The Landscape series comprises intimate charcoal studies of the Galilee terrain by the Palestinian artist Samah Shihadi: abandoned stone houses with arched windows, a free-standing pointed arch, collapsed masonry, the foundations of buildings traced in the grass, olive groves bounded by dry stone terraces and a close study of an olive branch heavy with fruit. Devoid of people, the drawings dwell on traces of habitation, a subject bound up in Shihadi’s practice with the Palestinian villages depopulated in 1948, among them her family’s village of Mi’ar. Working on a small scale, Shihadi applies the hyperrealist precision of her monumental drawings, rendering every stone and blade of grass with the patience of an archivist. Ruin and growth, the arch and the olive, appear in the series as twin markers of loss and continuity.