Hani Zurob
His work addresses concepts of exile, waiting, movement and displacement, and aims to present the collective Palestinian experience through reflections on the personal.
[citation needed] Due to Israeli restrictions on Palestinian movement he studied there as an "illegal sojourner" and lived under constant threat of deportation.
Celebrations of births and weddings and sad occasions such as illness and death - participating in these family events is regularly denied to the Gazan "illegal sojourners" in the West Bank.
Through the support of friends, colleagues and the Cité Internationale des Arts, Zurob was able to stay in Paris and eventually bring his wife there as well.
Author Kamal Boullata presents the chronological development of Zurob's work alongside the personal and political histories that influenced it, and Jean Fischer provided the introduction.
"Hani's practice provides an important voice in contemporary Palestinian Culture, as well as a significant contribution to the creation of an Arab Aesthetic.
At first glance these paintings appear sort of sad- a lost boy alone with his toys in no mans land- but Zurob prefers instead for them to be seen in terms of a sense of working through wrongs and gathering strength of conviction by generation.
"[14] This piece is a collision of the positive memories Zurob has of days during childhood spent on the beach with his family, layered with a photograph of his son's first time seeing the sea and fear of it.
"[16] These ideas were expanded upon in a monograph review in Harper's Bazaar Art Arabia, "In his mixed media "Standby" series, marking the 60th year of Israeli occupation, Zurob's disjointed bodies represent time far beyond just several hours in an airport – this is a temporary situation that has become permanent.
Altogether despite their cultural and temporal distance, there is much in the author's [Boullata's] analysis of Hani's work that recalls Bacon's preference for poetry as a primary source of inspiration as well as his own artistic responses to an earlier violent (European) reality.
For both artists the photograph is a central tool towards restaging a disassembled human form, reassembled in delineated frames or in the minimal outline of rooms, which function as fragile, often restrictive armatures for the body in space, but always, as Bacon said, as a "recording of being in the world".
[19] Barrage is a body of work made immediately after Zurob discovered that he would not be allowed to return home and would need to live in exile in Paris.
"[22] Steve Sabella writes, "Hani Zurob, one of the most significant painters of the new generation of Palestinian artists to emerge in the last decade, expresses, 'the best thing that happened to my art was the moment when I arrived in Paris because what I learnt in the last four years might have taken me a lifetime back in Palestine.
'"[23] As Mahmoud Hashhash wrote in the Le Monde Diplomatique, "The reds, yellows and blues are pure and vibrant and the lines are strong, so that the painting appears imbued with a dramatic energy.
