Hani Zurob
Waiting as a Language, Exile as Re-existence
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.
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 defining existence. His work can be found in several private and public collections internationally such as the British Museum, London; the Arab American National Museum, Michigan; Moderna galerija / Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova (MG+MSUM), Lubljiana, Slovenia; Williamsburg Art & Historical Center, NY; Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris; Association Renoir, Essoyes, France; Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris; Mairie de Paris; Imago Mundi-Luciano Benetton, Italy; Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah; Dalloul Art Foundation (DAF), Beirut; Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts, Amman.
Zurob’s works are not confined to the language of painting alone. His canvases are places imbued with dense, symbolic materials -tar, pigment, 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.
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 colour 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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