Majdal Nateel

Majdal Nateel (b. 1987 in Saudi Arabia) is an artist from a Palestinian refugee family. Nateel grew up in Gaza and received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Fine Art from al-Aqsa University in 2009. She is currently based in Sweden. Her artistic research has been conducted in many different places and contexts. While the main inspiration for her early artworks seems to be her own life experience, as Memory’s Salt (2011) or The Impact of Light and Glass (2013) make visible, after 2014, however, her artistic research process begins to shift. She begins, thereafter inquiring into the value of humanity under political challenges, more specifically, threats of repeated wars and the ongoing blockade of the Gaza Strip.

The installation work If I Was Not There (2014), for instance, supplied the artistic tools to talk on behalf of the many children who lost their voices and became victims of the bombs. Under the same context, she produced Without Coffins: a scene that embodies the contrast between the traditional honour given to Palestinian martyrs and the Israeli practice of keeping bodies in mass graves with only numbers to identify them. She also produced, in 2016, The Dream is Possible. This work aims to materialize the concept of ‘return’ as an individual and collective dream that defines the Palestinian. Between 2017 and 2019, she started the Lane project, an imaginary corridor that helps to overcome the feelings of being stuck between borders and unable to travel. In her last project, Studying the Voids of Amputation (2020-2021), she linked physical amputation and geographic amputation and produced a sequence of works on this theme. Recently, she was part of the group of artists who participated, with the Goethe Institute in Palestine, in the after-the-turn program entitled Decolonial and Noncanonical Learning in Gaza. She was also resident in SPK- Sommerakademie Paul Klee for 16 months, the program hosted by the Bern Academy of the Arts HKB.

Majdal’s work focuses on the impact of colonialism, occupation, and siege on the physical structure of human beings under these conditions.