MU.SA - Sintra Museum of Arts
Vernissage on Sunday, November 13
On view until Sunday, January 29
Inhabited by Malak’s paintings and poetic words, this exhibition sets us in the tense context of the Gaza Strip. Born in one of the most tumultuous and policed regions in the world, Malak witnessed the progressive territorial occupation and increased border-patrol in her native-country. The situation has become, in fact, one of an “open-air prison”. Like all local population, the painter is affected by restrictive access to essential goods and the hardly-attainable visas precluding most international mobility - comparable to an prisional confinement, established over a whole territory.
This Palestinian vulnerability to destructive airstrikes, violent policing and penalization, and abusive Israelian imprisonment is captured by Malak’s work, which presents a dichotomy of an unsettling isolation and simultaneous hope for a peaceful reconciliation. Surrounded by Gaza’s soundscape, the Palestinian figures shown in her paintings - mostly women with expressive, inquisitive gaze - compose, still, an affectionate familiar atmosphere of warm colors and symbolic peace, of natural harmony.
In the artist’s words, she «does not paint despite war and occupation, [but] because of it», in a documentary effort that outlives the ephemerality of human life. In conversation with the theme ‘Breaking the Bars’ from LEFFEST 2022, Malak exposes the imprisoning injustice that envelops Gaza inhabitants, and imbues her artistic practice with a precious, ambitioned freedom.