The National used the opening of Randa Maddah's first solo exhibition, "Hanging Gardens", at Tabari Artspace in Dubai's DIFC - running to 12 October 2024 - to introduce a broadsheet readership to Maddah's roots in Majdal Shams, her village in the Golan Heights, a territory Israel has occupied since the 1967 war.
The title borrows from the legendary Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and the article traces how Maddah threads that image through paintings built from lush greens, blood reds and ochres, where blooming flowers, deep roots and fragmenting human and animal figures stand in for a shared, interconnected consciousness rather than a single self. The piece situates this vocabulary against Maddah's own transnational life between France and the Golan, and against a village that had been struck by a rocket in July 2024, killing twelve children on a football pitch, an event the article ties to the way trauma settles into memory and, in turn, into her imagery.
"Hanging Gardens" is described as Maddah's first solo presentation, a fuller display of concerns - displacement, ceasefire-line separation from family, and a spiritual attachment to land - that her earlier, smaller appearances had only sketched. The National frames the show as evidence of an artist translating a specific and difficult geography into a landscape vocabulary any visitor to Tabari Artspace can read.
