Said Abu Shakra - Bulls and Hyenas, 2024, photo by Yigal Pardo

Said Abu Shakra wonders in the obscure backstreets of his inner soul, raises questions, and burrows into wounds and scars through his return to the story of his family and their 1948 displacement from the village of Al-Lajjun, today Kibbutz Megiddo. The clash of mnemonic fragments of refugeehood and wonderings with the events of the ongoing present constructs an emotionally charged visual language that positions the studio as a shelter for spiritual transformation.

The artist recalls his childhood in Umm al-Fahem, which was replete with stories of love, war, displacement and longing. Above all hovers the image of the great mother, Mariam, who carries the image of all mothers as such. Inspiration, power, terror, hope and love – all are cast into words in his book Mariam, and into expressive and sensitive images on paper, presented in this exhibition.
Late at night, as the hyenas awaken to ensnare their prey while wailing in anguish across the distance, Said awakens as well, climbs up to the studio in his attic, and begins to wonder the mazes of memory and emotion, to cry out. Under the cover of darkness, Said hurls himself at the paper without traces, with outbursting energy, an urgent painting powerfully inscribed with a tightly held breath. The black charcoal line and the red paint spots highlight his pain.

Facing all those, paper scrolls from the recent time unfold the story of the present era over dozens of meters. Gunshots in a frantic pace and blinding smoke expanding in its smudginess to the point of chocking the white paper. And here are the beasts: fainted, dead, lying on their backs, their eyes betraying a pitiful gaze of bottomless despair.

The exhibition is a personal and collective journey where the artist ventures out of a process of intimate autobiographic writing and artwork centered on his mother’s image, opening a wide window unto the repressed and traumatic Palestinian memory, as it blends with latter-day events.