Literature

Mi’ar 3, 2023 Charcoal on paper, 100 × 70 cm

In Mi’ar 3, the Palestinian artist Samah Shihadi returns to Mi’ar, the western Galilee village where her family lived before it was destroyed in 1948, its residents displaced to neighbouring villages. A path of bare rock and grass winds between dense banks of sabra cactus towards a stand of dark trees, drawing the viewer into a landscape emptied of its inhabitants. In Shihadi’s work the sabra symbolises the Nakba, the borders of destroyed Palestinian villages and survivability, a plant that persists where houses have vanished. Rendered in charcoal with hyperrealist precision, each pad, spine and blade of grass is described with forensic attention, so that the slow act of drawing serves as a form of testimony to the village’s former life.