“In the case of a political identity that’s being threatened, culture is a way of fighting against extinction and obliteration. Culture is a form of memory against effacement,” wrote scholar Edward Said in Culture and Resistance — a truth embodied by Palestinian visual art, which has developed under uniquely fractured conditions. Artists separated by borders and exile often create without knowledge of their contemporaries’ work; yet this geographic scattering hasn’t weakened the resulting art. Instead, it has produced a diverse body of work united by the common purpose of bearing witness and asserting existence in the face of erasure and using visual language to document realities that dominant narratives distort or ignore. Here are five Palestinian visual artists whose work explores the layered complexities of personal and national resilience.
Saj Issa
Saj Issa is a Palestinian-American artist, raised between the Midwest and the West Bank, Palestine. Currently based in New York City, she is known for exploring cultural memory and identity through painting and ceramics. She has honed her practice through artist residencies at Belger Crane Yard Studios in Kansas City and Craft Alliance in St. Louis, among other programs. Issa cites a formative moment in Ramallah, when she discovered a pile of broken pottery shards at a former ceramic factory — she was captivated by the fragments, imagining the ways they had been shaped and the stories they carried.
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Beesan Arafat
Beesan Arafat’s paintings demonstrate both artistic mastery and profound devotion to Palestine, its people and culture. She works from the principle that art can carry more political force than politics itself, creating canvases that tell stories Western media frequently ignores. Among her most striking works is her tribute to the Global Sumud Flotilla, the largest civilian aid convoy ever assembled for Gaza, transforming solidarity into a visual record.
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Hazem Harb
Born in 1980 in Gaza, Hazem Harb now resides between Rome and Dubai, creating photographic collages, mixed media works, acrylic paintings and drawings. His practice is rooted in the concept of memory — particularly its fragility and selectiveness, pondering the way certain moments persist while others disappear or get distorted. For Harb, centering truth-telling and factuality becomes an act of resistance against erasure.
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Sliman Mansour
Hailing from Birzeit, Mansour played a foundational role in shaping contemporary Palestinian art and served as head of the League of Palestinian Artists throughout the 1980s. His initial body of work portrayed Palestinian life and resistance through images of peasants and traditionally dressed women. In the 1970s, olive trees and themes of land became central to his practice, while his latest work zeroes in on isolated figures expressing the weariness of endless anticipation and the weight of loss.
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Dima Srouji
Palestinian architect and artist Dima Srouji approaches cultural heritage as a site for communal repair. Her artistic practice involves collaboration with anthropologists, archaeologists, stone masons, sound designers and glassblowers, working with materials sourced from Palestine. A former Jameel Fellow at the Victoria & Albert Museum (2022-2023), she currently directs the studio Underground Palestine within the MA City Design programme at London’s Royal College of Art.
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