Palestinian artist Ruba Salameh works on the canvas of art in the face of killings

Zawyeh Gallery is presenting Refined Compositions, a solo exhibition by Palestinian artist Ruba Salameh (Sept. 13 – Nov. 9) at Zawyeh’s space in Alserkal Avenue, Dubai. (The Palestinian-owned gallery also has a space in Ramallah, Palestine). Created at a time when catastrophe unfolds in real time, Refined Compositions asks: How can one continue to make art in the face of genocide? In her new works, Salameh turns to abstraction as a way of carrying memory, mourning, and resilience, while remaining in dialogue with late Palestinian painter and art historian, Kamal Boullata.

Boullata’s seminal piece Homage to the Flag (1995) becomes a living point of resonance, connecting Salameh’s practice to a wider continuum of Palestinian artists, for whom the Palestinian flag and its colours are both a site of hope and of censorship. In Salameh’s work, the colours of the flag, historically banned or suppressed, reappear in reduced and reimagined palettes.

Her method is one of patience and layering: canvases are sometimes left aside for months or years before being reworked, concealed, and resurfaced. The cycle of interruption and return mirrors the fragile but enduring nature of memory itself. A recurring presence in her paintings is the ant. Tiny, almost invisible, ants emerge along borders and surfaces as fragile yet enduring markers.

Work titled Mittelmeer-100.

For Salameh, ants symbolise hard work, farming culture, and a deep connection to the land. Their organic movement across the earth reflects their role as an inherent part of the planet’s ecosystem; it is a symbol of the quiet endurance of Palestinian workers and farmers. By weaving together personal memory, cultural lineage and a commitment to abstraction, Salameh’s Refined Compositions offers a deeply felt meditation on what endures, and how grief, resistance, and hope moves across generations. There is no one or simple answer to the question, how does one make art in the face of genocide? This is especially true since we are not speaking of a closed chapter, but of a catastrophe unfolding in real-time right before our eyes.

Witnessing a genocide induces a state of panic and unremitting horror, since it only leads to merciless devastation, leaving the victims despairing of mercy. Salameh finds her way forward through abstract painting, weaving her own narrative, while connecting across generations to art historian and artist Kamal Boullata’s work. Seeking filiation and meaning amid a lingering sense of loss and powerlessness, Salameh finds a transformative moment in Boullata’s Homage to the Flag (1995), whose legacy continues to echo and resonate through successive generations in Palestine.

The Zawyeh exhibition reflects primarily on the persistence of certain symbols, such as the Palestinian flag, in the work of Palestinian artists. Reducing the colour palette as a gesture encouraged Salameh to revisit an act similar to that of other Palestinian artists before her, as an act of rightful reclamation. It revealed how, even with the passing of time, historical visual elements have remained charged with urgency and continue to inhabit the thoughts and practices of Palestinian artists.

The works focus less on reimagining flags as objects and more on tracing the emotional afterlife of their colours and how they manifest and shape a collective identity. Salameh’s choice of chromatic reduction in many of the paintings draws a powerful connection to a long lineage of Palestinian artists for whom the flag has symbolised both hope and censorship. Historically banned or suppressed, the flag’s palette has long stood in defiance of repression and silencing. Here, abstraction and reduction serve as a space for both grief and dissent. Many of the works in the exhibition were set aside for months, even years, then revisited and layered repeatedly until they arrived at their final forms.

Ruba Salameh strikes a defiant pose.

In reading the introduction to Geometry of Light, a 2021 retrospective of Boullata’s work in Berlin, where Salameh currently lives and works, the etymology of the word “abstraction” takes on added resonance. Derived from the Latin abstractus, meaning “to pull away” or distance from the object, abstraction becomes a space rooted in memory – a way to navigate and reconstruct what has forcibly been erased. Salameh’s works echo this sensibility, collapsing inward through layers of paint, concealment and erasure, mimicking the processes of fossilisation and decay, reflecting on land, memory and belonging which are subject to the same process. Boullata’s spectral presence offered Salameh a sense of spiritual guidance, filling her lingering quest to understand her own practice at a time of grief and collapse, not in isolation, but as part of a larger continuum shaped by accumulation and the cultural heritage of earlier Palestinian generations.

Building on these influences, Salameh’s signature motif – ants – appears throughout the body of work. Barely visible from a distance, the subterranean creatures emerge as faint marks, like dust, ash or early mould. They crawl across the surface, gather along hard edges and translucent borders, or drift alone in open space. Like the compositions themselves, their presence is layered and shifting, evoking contamination and invasion perhaps, but also persistence and rootedness. Scattered and fragile, but intrinsic to the land, they recall the workers who build and the farmers who tend the soil – lives disfigured and shattered under the weight of occupation in Palestine. In contrast to the paintings’ strict and rigid lines – a reference to the occupation - the ants embody an unruly, enduring communal life. In a world where death has become banal, they insist on the everyday persistence of work and the daily dignity of survival.