Promises are for never: Bashir Makhoul eyes pledges in Zawyeh Gallery show

Zawyeh Gallery is currently hosting The Promise, a solo exhibition by renowned Palestinian artist Bashir Makhoul. To run till June 30, in The Promise Makhoul unveils his latest works, exploring themes of home, displacement and memory through visual narratives.

The exhibition title encapsulates a poetic and ambiguous statement of intent — an assertion that is both an event and its upending. A promise is made and, inevitably, can be broken.

The duality is at the heart of Makhoul’s practice, where creation and fragmentation, completion and rupture, coexist. At the core of the exhibition is the recurring motif of the house, depicted in its most elemental form: a cube with a door and a window.

The geometric structures, arranged in dense and chaotic formations, reflect the overcrowded conditions of refugee camps and marginalised communities. Despite their elegant colour palettes, the artworks reveal a stark contrast between aesthetic beauty and unsettling political realities.

An olive tree in close-up.

Featuring works in painting, electroplated sculptures, printmaking, handwoven wool and silk tapestries and mixed media works, the art explores identity, fragmentation, dispossession, and longing. Through layered symbols such as home, petals, and patterns, Makhoul examines the fragile balance between loss and hope, chaos and order, destruction and rebirth.

Home for him is both a sanctuary and a site of loss. It is not only a place where one builds memories, but also a location where one loses them. Home therefore does not offer only security, but also gives birth to instability and loss, especially if home is a refugee camp. Makhoul explores his relationship with his homeland, examining its emotional and psychological impact. He works between lived reality and nostalgia, presence and displacement, permanence and impermanence.

Weaving is just not a skill for him: it is also the reconstruction of memories while electroplated sculptures symbolise disruption. As a Palestinian who has spent most of his life in exile, the notion of home is therefore conflicted. The Palestinian experience of home under occupation is marked by the sense of belonging and also the haunting feel of uncertainty. Among the featured series is Fractured Oblivion, an extension of the artist’s earlier Promise series. Scattered blossom petals — once symbols of unity — now encircle dark voids that echo bullet holes Makhoul photographed in Beirut in the 1990s.

The colour hides pain.

The war-torn surfaces evoke his family’s exile during the Nakba, while the petals suggest healing and the voids, as the title implies, lead only to oblivion. The themes of rupture and continuity extend into the Skein series, where tangled threads symbolise exile and return. Works such as Drift and Density (3) explore the Palestinian experience of loss and perseverance, with Density (3) standing as a testament to a fragmented nation bound together by resilience and solidarity. Makhoul’s latest experiments in electroplated 3D printing introduce an unexpected crystalline structure inside his house formations.

The approach reaches its pinnacle in My Olive Tree, where geometric structures take on the spectral form of an ancient olive tree — a personal symbol for the artist, standing between two parcels of land he does not own. The olive tree, much like the Palestinian people, waits — embodying persistence and the inevitable fulfillment of the promise to return. The Promise offers a powerful meditation on identity, displacement, and resilience, and marks Makhoul’s first solo exhibition in Dubai.

He was born in 1963 in the village of Makhoul in the Galilee region of Palestine. The artist was only five years old when he and his nine siblings — four sisters and five brothers — lost their father, leaving his mother alone to raise them. He attended school till he was ten, and around the age of 13, began to supplement his schooling with paid work at a carpentry shop to contribute to the household income. It was his boss at this shop who discovered his artistic skills and passion for design; eighteen months after he began, Makhoul was named the manager of the workshop.

Following secondary school, he also made violins designed for Arabic music and played them at weddings. In the early 1980s, he began to study fine arts at Haifa University, later relocating to the United Kingdom. In 2017, Makhoul became the first Palestinian Vice-Chancellor at the University for the Creative Arts, UK, cementing his central place in the art world of the Palestinian diaspora.

Bashir Makhoul is a Palestinian artist.

Exile has significantly impacted Palestinian art, forcing artists to grapple with displacement, identity, and the ongoing struggle for homeland. Palestinian artists have used their work to express the pain of loss, cultivate nostalgia for a lost homeland, and document the tragic experiences of their families and communities. Exile also has led to the development of new artistic mediums and styles, as artists adapt to changed circumstances.

Collecteurs.com notes that the Palestinian experience of exile “is a multifaceted tapestry woven with threads of longing and resistance. At its core lies the dichotomy between the tangible memories of those who were forced to leave their homeland by Israel’s military forces and the inherited narratives passed down to subsequent generations. Throughout their diasporic journey, Palestinians have grappled with the challenge of preserving their heritage and resisting attempts to delegitimise their indigenous connection to the land ... diaspora, far from being a passive state of displacement, emerged as a locus of resistance and cultural resurgence. Artists and writers crafted narratives of resilience, depicting the indomitable spirit of a people determined to resist cultural assimilation and preserve their identity.”