Sharif Waked
A Pixel of Dissent
Sharif Waked [b. Nazareth, 1964 – Palestine] is a visual and multimedia artist whose work investigates the languages of power, official narratives, and the constant tension between memory and erasure. The son of refugees from the destroyed town of Mjedil, he lives and works between Haifa and Nazareth, in a geography suspended between an imposed Israeli citizenship and a reclaimed Palestinian identity. His work spans various media—video, installation, photography, digital painting—but remains anchored to a radical question: how can one exist visually when one’s image is manipulated, distorted, or expelled?
Waked’s work moves along the fine line between irony and dissent, citation and interruption. Through a skillful use of appropriation and montage, he deconstructs the mechanisms of media and cultural representation. In his celebrated videos—such as the Chic Point series or To be continued—the artist’s gaze becomes surgical: he dissects, exposes, and contaminates. The aesthetics of control—military, colonial, aesthetic—are unveiled and sabotaged from within.
His work is a fragmented and ever-shifting archive that collects and reworks historical, visual, and linguistic materials from Arab and Palestinian culture, hybridizing them with the codes of contemporary art and digital media. In this process, the artist performs a dual gesture: on one hand, he protects memory, and on the other, he denounces its manipulation. Arabic calligraphy, traditional architectural motifs, textile patterns, but also Israeli bureaucracy or television images: everything is remixed, destabilized, and turned into critical matter. This is where the political strength of Waked’s art lies: not in explicitly depicting oppression, but in cracking its forms of representation.
Sharif Waked works against the fixation of Palestinian identity in media stereotypes. His aesthetics yield neither to exoticism nor victimhood. On the contrary, he proposes a complex, ironic, and sometimes disturbing vision that forces the viewer to continuously renegotiate their perspective. In this sense, each of his works is an exercise in decolonizing the gaze.
For Waked, art is a symbolic battlefield where the fight is for the right to complexity, contradiction, and nuance. “Being a Palestinian artist doesn’t mean being didactic,” he has stated on multiple occasions. And his work proves it: it does not offer answers but creates short circuits. It does not explain but disarms. It does not represent but interrogates.
Sharif Waked’s art is an invitation to resist not only with words but with the eyes, with images, with the ability to escape, if only for a moment, the dominion of oppression.
@ Elettra Stamboulis
See more https://m-a-i.qc.ca/en/public-plus/exhibition/live-in-palestine/sharif-waked/
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