You can find the Holy Land depicted with breathtaking subtlety on the partitions of church buildings and galleries throughout Europe. However Jerusalem and Bethlehem, within the Western creativeness, are inclined to look extra like Italy’s Urbino or Siena, than Center Jap cities occupied for two,000 years by a melting pot of communities, together with Palestinian Christians. Now unfold throughout the Israeli and Palestinian territories, the Holy Land, sacred to Judaism, Islam and Christianity, has exercised generations of artists and ideologues, who’ve made and remade it in their very own picture.
Nevertheless, for the Palestinian artist Dima Srouji, The Holy Land is solely house—the positioning of childhood recollections, “each good and unhealthy”, she says. Her present, A Cosmogram of Holy Views, which opens as we speak at London’s Ab Anbar Gallery, is the product of a decade’s price of analysis into the constructed heritage of Palestinian Christians, and a lifetime’s expertise of life below Israeli occupation.
It has at its coronary heart what the artist describes as “the cognitive dissonance” between the way in which the surface world views her house and “the truth on the bottom”, which she has represented right here with quiet directness. In works of nice visible energy, she juxtaposes the parable with the truth. Making virtuosic use of a number of media—90s polaroids and Renaissance praedellas, in addition to blown glass, carved stone and moulded wax objects that have been hand-made in Palestine—she flirts always with a darkish, surreal comedy.
In a collection of tinted glass collages, European work are overlaid with scenes of contemporary life in Palestine. In Return to Nazareth, grandiose frescos of the Holy Household’s homecoming after Herod’s bloodbath of the innocents kind the backdrop for a picture from Srouji’s personal childhood within the metropolis. The artist’s toddler pores and skin is seen turning purple as a result of lack of air, at a time, in the course of the First Gulf Conflict, when few Palestinian youngsters have been issued with fuel masks.
Dima Srouji, A Cosmogram of Holy Views, 2025. Set up view, Ab-Anbar Gallery, London
Photograph: Sergey Novikov. Picture courtesy of the artist and Ab-Anbar Gallery
Different works draw on Srouji’s cautious documentation of Palestinian heritage—stone quarries, mother-of-pearl makers, and unbuilt church buildings—a heritage which she describes as little-studied. Right now, following years of struggle in Gaza, and amid the as but untested ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, that heritage stays in danger.
Although there are nonetheless thriving craft industries throughout Palestine’s West Financial institution, the observe of Palestinian artisans has been modified by a long time of violence and occupation. Historically, they might use mom of pearl, introduced from the Crimson or Useless Seas, to make reliquaries for church buildings world wide.
In A Cosmogram, Srouji has used the identical mom of pearl methods to make a mannequin of her grandparents’ “utterly unusual” home in Nazareth. Her grandmother, twice displaced by battle, evidently tended the home with nice care, however as we speak Srouji describes Nazareth as “an unliveable metropolis”. “No-one will ever stay in that home once more,” she says.
“I’m enjoying with what’s sacred,” she explains, pointing to a collection of reimagined stone-cut shrines, studded with luminous roundels of stained glass. The objects have been left notably, hauntingly empty, as a result of, for Srouji, “what’s sacred is the shrine itself—and anyway all of the relics have been looted or destroyed”.
In a few of the exhibition’s most compelling works, we’re invited to ponder what may be thought-about holy amid the horror in Gaza, the place the gradual withdrawal of Israeli Defence Forces is at present revealing nonetheless extra destruction. Feeling powerless within the face of the slaughter of her buddies and family members, Srouji has hung out in her studio carving, by hand, wax fashions of human varieties.
Dima Srouji, Phantom Votives, 2025. Beeswax, candles, sound by Dirar Kalash
Picture courtesy of the artist and Ab-Anbar Gallery
The works are a twist on the lengthy custom of votive choices in church buildings, however, right here, “it’s my very own votive to the folks of Gaza”, she says. Reproduced in 3D utilizing photogrammetry software program, some are based mostly on elements of her personal physique, however others are the dismembered limbs of youngsters who’ve been killed by Israeli forces. In line with Palestinian well being authorities, as of October 7 this yr, the variety of youngsters killed had reached 20,179—30% of the whole 67,173 deaths recorded because the similar date in 2023.
“It’s the one factor that has saved me sane these final months in the course of the genocide,” Srouji says. With out flinching, she provides: “The wax seems like pores and skin—there’s one thing heat about it.”
It’s maybe the curse of the Palestinian artist as we speak to co-exist so intently with demise, however Srouiji’s work is a optimistic assertion of her group’s lengthy existence and heritage. “It’s way more about Palestinian life than about Palestinian demise,” she says.
Underpinned by in-depth educational analysis into myriad strands of Palestinian tradition, A Cosmogram of Holy Views provokes us to interrogate dynamic and ambivalent relationships between delusion and historical past, artwork and actuality, the residing and the useless. “I need to push our presence so we aren’t erased,” says Srouji. “I need to hang-out folks.”
A Cosmogram of Holy Views is at Ab Anbar Gallery, London, till 29 November
