Exhibitions

Between Closeness and Loss - Familial Spaces of Memory in the Work of Samah Shihadi and Michael Halak

The exhibition In Between brings together two outstanding voices in contemporary Palestinian art: Samah Shihadi and Michael Halak, both artists negotiate the complex experiences of belonging, alienation and identity in their work. Family and the place of growing up repeatedly appear in their works as carriers of collective and individual memory. The result is a multi-layered narrative about geopolitical conflicts, landscape and the family as a personal archive. A narrative that is also conspicuous for its absences and gaps and in which the ghosts of memory and the creation of meaning appear again and again.

Samah Shihadi works primarily with detailed pencil drawings, drawing her inspiration from her family's experiences and traditions. The central role of landscapes has become deeply engraved in her memory and goes far beyond the realistic depiction of the landscape itself: here, landscape is symbolically and emotionally charged. Themes such as fragility, resistance and care repeatedly appear in her works. In many series, she draws on personal and family photographs in order to preserve, transform and question them in a graphic translation. Her visual worlds are characterised by female figures, moments of introspection and everyday objects that seem like fragile relics. For Shihadi, family is not only a source of origin, but also a bearer of silent resilience - it embodies care, tradition, vulnerability and strength at the same time. Her drawings are located on the threshold between visibility and what often disappears in collective narratives: the intimate, often unnoticed stories of women, mothers and daughters.

Michael Halak approaches the subject from a different perspective. At first glance, his realistic paintings of everyday objects look like sober still lifes. But their presence points to what is missing: to bodies, to voices, to the stories that are connected to things. Halak does not think of family as a visible community, but as a trace, as that which remains - or is no longer tangible. A sense of loss and alienation resonates in many of his works. The family space functions as a microcosm of a larger reality: migration, social insecurity, the fragile legacy of belonging.

The juxtaposition of Shihadi's graphic intimacy and Halak's painterly precision creates a dialogue space in which questions of representation, memory and political visibility are negotiated. Their works unfold a profound dialogue about family as a place of remembrance, resistance and transmission - but also as a space characterised by ruptures, omissions and uncertainties. Both artists do not paint an idealised picture of family belonging, but rather make visible how complex, ambivalent and politically charged it can be.

Shihadi and Halak deal with the tension between the individual and collective experience, between image and reality, between past and present. This exhibition therefore sees itself not only as a presentation of two unusual artistic positions, but also as an invitation to rethink the relationship between art, identity and resistance in a conflict-ridden world.