Born in 1959 in the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza, Tayseer Barakat is one of Palestine’s most important and enduring contemporary artists. His family was originally displaced from al-Majdal, a village near Ashkelon. After completing a degree in painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Alexandria in 1983, Barakat settled in the West Bank, where he now lives and works in Ramallah.
His art draws deeply from both personal memory and collective history. Working across a variety of mediums—including wood, metal, and glass—Barakat’s creative practice is rooted in experimentation, though painting remains at the heart of his artistic expression. His work draws on the region’s ancient visual languages and historical narratives, reshaping them into contemporary reflections on identity, displacement, and memory. For the mural at the Palestinian Museum, Tayseer Barakat drew inspiration from the concept of New Visions, a movement rooted in the use of humble, locally available materials as a form of cultural resistance. In this work, he turns to two elemental forces: wood and fire—materials found in daily life, yet charged with symbolic weight. Wood, organic and enduring, meets fire, destructive yet purifying. In their encounter, a quiet struggle unfolds: fire consumes the wood, but in doing so, it leaves behind traces—scars, ashes, memory. This tension between survival and erasure echoes the broader themes of persistence, fragility, and resistance that define Barakat’s practice. Barakat’s figures often float, flee, or vanish—portraying the condition of exile and the fragility of survival. The works speak in silence: fragile lines, suspended gestures, the presence of ghosts. Memory, for him, is not nostalgia—it is a living force that shapes identity, protest, and belonging. Over the decades, Barakat has exhibited widely in Palestine and internationally. His solo shows include Shoreless Sea, Lightness of Being, and Distant Voices, all shown at Zawyeh Gallery. His work has appeared in major biennials—from São Paulo to Alexandria—and is part of public collections including the British Museum, the Jordan National Gallery, and the Barjeel Foundation. His art has been featured in major solo and group exhibitions worldwide, including the São Paulo Biennale (1997), The Number that Became a Name (Brazil, 1996), Distant Voices (Zawyeh Gallery, Ramallah, 2014), Masters of Palestinian Art (Busapesti, 2016, Beijing International Art Biennale (2017) and exhibitions across Japan, the United States, Europe, and the Arab world. Barakat is also a cultural pioneer: a founding member of Al-Wasiti Art Center in Jerusalem, Halaq Hall in Ramallah—now home to the Palestinian Association of Contemporary Art (PACA)—and the International Art Academy-Palestine. |
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