Hani Zurob
Waiting as a Language, Exile as Re-sistance
Hani Zurob [b. 1976 in the Rafah refugee camp, Gaza Strip – Palestine] is a contemporary artist who has lived and worked in Paris, France since 2006. The artist earned a degree in Fine Arts from Al-Najah University in Nablus. In his works, Zurob addresses global concepts of identity, place, and memory, with all the complex nuances related to states of suspension, delays, waiting, exile, movement and displacement, absence, and resistance.
Born in 1976 in the Rafah refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, Hani Zurob is today one of the most significant Palestinian artists on the international scene. His personal life—marked by war, imprisonment, and forced separation from his land—is deeply intertwined with his artistic research. For almost twenty years, he has lived and worked in Paris, in an exile that is not an escape but a suspension: a space of waiting, listening, and resistance.
Zurob’s works are not confined to the language of painting alone. His canvases are places imbued with dense, symbolic materials—tar, sand, glass—that evoke scorched earth, impassable borders, and constantly redefined identities. Tar, in particular, is a central element in many of his series, becoming a visual metaphor for oppression, immobility, but also for transformation and rooting. This is not merely an aesthetic choice: it is a political stance. The artist has chosen to refuse materials produced in Israel, adhering to a form of cultural boycott and asserting an ethical consistency that extends even to his pigments and surfaces.
His works do not directly narrate conflicts, but they inhabit them. They address universal themes—waiting, separation, memory—through suspended figures, poised bodies, and layered interior landscapes. In his work, biography becomes geography, painting becomes testimony.
For Zurob, art is a political act precisely because it remains profoundly human. It seeks neither slogans nor direct denunciation, but instead creates images capable of drawing the viewer into a lived condition—sometimes heart-wrenching, always authentic. In a world where Palestine risks being reduced to a media image or an abstract symbol, his painting restores flesh, voice, and time to the experience.
“There are no boundaries between political issues and personal stories in my work,” he has stated. And indeed, in his works, there is no separation between narrative and gesture, between color and memory, between the urgency of the present and the melancholy of what has been lost.
@ Elettra Stamboulis
See more https://www.hanizurob.com/
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