Villa Sträuli's agenda entry for In Between announces its two-person presentation of Michael Halak and Samah Shihadi, brought together in the Swiss institution's Winterthur exhibition programme. Halak's practice centres on landscape and stone, painting rock formations and terrain from the Galilee that hold questions of place, belonging and time within an ostensibly geological subject. Shihadi works in a very different register, using dense graphite and charcoal drawing to render domestic interiors, textiles and household objects, building an intimate visual record of Palestinian everyday life and memory.
Shown together, the two practices set a painter's outdoor, geological attention against a draughtswoman's close, interior focus, a pairing that the venue's listing frames as an exploration of the space "in between" those two registers of land and home. Villa Sträuli's programming regularly brings Middle Eastern and diasporic artists into a Swiss institutional context, and this presentation continues that pattern with two artists whose work rarely shows together.
Tabari represents both Michael Halak and Samah Shihadi. The Winterthur showing extends their exhibition history into a European institutional setting, placing Halak's landscapes and Shihadi's interiors in direct conversation for the length of the run.
