Ahead of Hungry for Home at Tabari, Positive Magazine interviews the Palestinian artist Samah Shihadi and the writer Ranya Tabari Idliby, whose words accompany the drawings.
Carmen Mc Intosh introduces the exhibition as 35 works by Shihadi, drawn in pencil and charcoal so precisely that they can be mistaken for photographs. Food is the subject, tied to tradition and roots, and behind it lie displacement, a lost home and the need to return.
Shihadi explains how pencil and charcoal became the materials that express her, and how fruit carries meaning in her work: a pear beneath a cluster of knives as a symbol of pressure on women, apples on a scale to speak of injustice. She describes life as an Arab woman artist in a conservative society, and her daily routine in the studio. Her dish of choice is manakish, recalling her mother at the oven.
Idliby, a Palestinian writer based in New York, says she first saw Shihadi's work at the Dubai art fair that March and that Maliha Tabari asked her to consider working with the artist. She was already writing a cooking memoir called Hungry for Home, which became the springboard for the drawings. "The table is where I became Palestinian," she writes, recalling three generations of refugees gathered around it.
The exhibition opened at Tabari in November 2018.