THE ESSENCE OF HOME
Gazan artist Mohammed Al-Hawajri on making art that celebrates love and life, and seeking solace in the scents of Palestine.
By India Stoughton
In the first week of September 2023, in his spacious studio in Gaza, artist Mohammed Al-Hawajri put the finishing touches to a large painting. It captured a burning tree stump flanked by four silhouetted animals. On one side, two deer are fleeing, while on the other a single deer is attacked by a lion. In the foreground, a herd of colourful goats looks on, as if silently observing the scene.
Based on The Tree of Life, a vast Umayyad mosaic in Jericho that shows two deer grazing peacefully on one side of a tree, while a lion makes his kill on the other, Al-Hawajri’s painting was titled The Tree of Life Is Burning. In his work, Al-Hawajri offers a new interpretation of the scene, replacing the fleeing deer with a horde of other animals who passively observe the unfolding events.
Al-Hawajri, who grew up in Gaza, draws inspiration from his surroundings, where nature and everyday scenes are reflected in his paintings. Through his art he attempts to document his emotions and experiences. In one impactful series, Guernica-Gaza, he reimagines famous paintings in a contemporary style, allowing him to express his personal vision of the world.
Opening image, The artist in front of a work he painted for his eldest son. In an expressionist style, it was one of the paintings that survived whenhis house was bombed in February 2024. Above, Harvesters Resting–Jean-François Millet (1850). From the series Guernica-Gaza (2010-13), which reimagines iconic paintings by celebrated artists to capture the harsh reality of life in the Gaza Strip. Ahmed (2012), above. Al Hawajri photographed by Benjamin Malick; Harvesters Resting courtesy of the artist.
As the situation in Gaza escalated, Al-Hawajri and his wife, artist Dina Mattar, fled with their four children to his sister’s house in Nuseirat. Later, with nowhere left to go, he moved his family to Rafah, along with hundreds of thousands of other displaced Gazans. “I knew nobody there, so I had no house to go to. We had a tent, but no water, no bathroom, no food,” he says. “We lived there at the Egyptian border for four months, just trying to survive, day by day.”
Al-Hawajri’s roots in Gaza go deep. Born in 1976 in the Bureij refugee camp, he was raised in a farming family with a strong connection to the land. His paintings often focus on animals, which he uses to symbolise the hardships of life under siege, but over the course of his career he has exhibited a seemingly endless capacity for experimentation and invention.
His creativity was spurred by the frequent shortages of materials in Gaza. Early in his career he worked with scavenged animal bones, covering them with delicately drawn patterns that transformed them into objects of beauty. He titled the series Ugly-Beautiful. These sculptural works—one of which was acquired by the Institut du Monde Arabe in 2009—explore the contradiction between life and death. Later projects, which display a trademark black humour, include Cactus Borders, a series of intricate installations inspired by the prickly plant, which grows indestructibly throughout the Palestinian territories, transformed into objects including a pair of flipflops, a human heart, a pair of nail-studded boots and a tongue. Guernica-Gaza, a series of artworks created between 2010 and 2013, reimagines iconic paintings by artists including Marc Chagall, Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso to capture the harsh realities of life in Gaza.
Al-Hawajri has exhibited worldwide at prominent institutions and arts festivals, but he was also intrinsic to the fabric of the Gazan art scene. The Eltiqa Group for Contemporary Art, which he founded with his wife and some friends in 2002, was one of the first to offer training and visibility to local artists. It was bombed early in the war, leaving his wife’s paintings, which were hanging in the gallery, lying shredded in the rubble. “People might think that in the last 15 years the art scene in Gaza wasn’t very developed, but on the contrary, there was a vivid life for artists in Gaza.”
Top, The Three of Life Is Burning. Left, Al-Hawajri views the destruction from his sister’s house in Nuseirat. Middle, Welcome to Gaza, from the Red Carpet series, is a commentary on the challenges of daily life in Gaza. Middle and bottom photos courtesy of Mohammed Al-Hawajri.
In the end, it was his international profile that allowed him to save his family. He already had a golden visa from the UAE but lacked the $30,000 needed to pay for the family’s passage to Egypt. Friends in Europe and the US offered to start crowdfunding campaigns, but the artist refused. “This wasn’t something I felt able to accept while maintaining my sense of dignity,” he says. “I felt very strongly that it was important for me to earn the money through my work.” In the spring of 2024, friends in Germany organised the sale of works he had left there after taking part in Documenta 15 in 2022. It raised enough to buy their freedom.
Following a difficult chapter, Al-Hawajri and his family have settled in Sharjah where he continues his artistic career. He is now participating in Sharjah Biennial 16 with a selection of works that celebrate life and cultural identity, offering a visual presentation that reflects the depth of his artistic experience.
The exhibition is a welcome showcase for an artist who has increasingly faced attempts to distort his work. At Documenta 15, where he exhibited pieces from his Guernica-Gaza series, which draws on the artist’s experiences of conflict to send a universal anti-war message, his work became the centre of a bitter controversy. Friends even urged him to withdraw from the event, he says, after a code used by extremists to signify a death threat was graffitied on the wall of the gallery. Then, in September last year, a solo exhibition in Germany was abruptly cancelled at the eleventh hour with the organisers citing security concerns in the wake of renewed accusations of antisemitism.
Heart of Gaza (2017). Part of the series Cactus Borders. The cactus isa symbol that is used time and time again in Palestinian art. The soilis barren and water is scarce, yet the plant grows and flourishes. Photo courtesy of Mohammed Al-Hawajri.
“Palestinians don’t have the freedom to express themselves due to the political circumstances, which turns dialogue into disagreements,” the artist says. “This is what happened at Documenta. My work was labelled as antisemitic and I wasn’t even given the opportunity to express myself. Western Europe is said to be the home of freedom of expression, but I’ve started to become aware of the lack of freedom of expression when it comes to the experience of being Palestinian.”
Al-Hawajri doesn’t consider his work to be intrinsically political. “For every artist, one of the biggest needs is to be authentic. I felt I couldn’t be authentic drawing flowers and beautiful things in Gaza,” he says. “This is my personal history—my history as a Palestinian.” But despite his work’s references to conflict and to the economic, social and political impacts of the blockade on Gaza, “I would not describe it as an act of resistance,” he says. “It is a form of expression of love and of life.”
Now, Al-Hawajri is preparing for a new life, with a safe place to call home and a studio space provided by the Sharjah Art Foundation. But his art is so deeply rooted in the history and culture of Palestine, its people and animals, its land, sea and sky, that the path ahead feels unclear. Gaza, he says, is where he felt most free. Yet to return seems all but impossible. “At the moment there are no plans to go back to Gaza because there is no Gaza to go back to,” he says.
In the meantime, the artist is looking to his past as a way to navigate the uncharted territory of his future. During a residency at Darat al Funun in 2001, he bought a large stock of spices from an elderly Iraqi refugee on the streets of Amman. Accustomed to working with unconventional materials, he decided to use them in a series of paintings, which he entitled Ruh wa Ruwa’ih, a play on the Arabic words for soul and scent. Today, this memory is imbued with a deep longing for home. “Every time I smelled cumin or zaatar, these Palestinian herbs, they reestablished my connection to my home country, so I’m planning to do something with spices again,” he says. “At this moment, I feel the need to remember all the beautiful things about my homeland.”
