Literature

Wheat, 2018 Charcoal on paper, 100 × 70 cm

In Wheat, the Palestinian artist Samah Shihadi depicts an older woman and man at work outside a house, the woman pouring grain into a large metal drum set over an open wood fire as the man tends a sack of wheat. The scene evokes the seasonal preparation of wheat in Palestinian villages, such as the boiling of grain to make burghul, a communal practice tied to the harvest and to provisioning the household for the year ahead. Made in the year of Hungry for Home, the work belongs to Shihadi’s body of drawings on food and its preparation as bearers of cultural memory and customs that are gradually disappearing. Her hyperrealist rendering of fire, smoke, metal and cloth lends the documentary scene the gravity of ritual.