In a Daily Mail travel feature on Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, Philip Lancaster recalls seeing Spellbound, a solo exhibition by the Palestinian artist Samah Shihadi, at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.
Most of the article is devoted to Razzouk Tattoo, the family business inside Jaffa Gate on St George Street that has tattooed Christian pilgrims since the year 1300. Lancaster meets Wassim Razzouk, the 27th generation of the family to do the work, and describes the olive wood stencils, some hundreds of years old, that he still uses every day. The writer chooses the Jerusalem cross, the shop's most popular design.
He goes on to the Old City at night, from the Damascus Gate to the illuminated Western Wall, and then to Tel Aviv, with its Bauhaus White City and the Brutalist building of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. There, he writes, he saw Spellbound one evening, an amazing solo show by the award winning Palestinian artist Samah Shihadi.
Samah Shihadi draws in pencil and charcoal with a precision that is often mistaken for photography. Tabari presented her solo exhibition Hungry for Home in Dubai in 2018 and announced her London debut at Cromwell Place in 2020, and our exhibition archive records her 2023 solo exhibition Roots at Museum MORE in the Netherlands.