Shada Safadi
Image as Insubordination
Shada Safadi [b. Majdal Shams, Occupied Golan Heights – Syria] is a visual artist and educator who currently lives and works in Ramallah. Her practice moves between printmaking, painting, and material experimentation, all underpinned by a constant political urgency: to transform art into an act of resistance. Poised between belonging and exile, rootedness and dislocation, Safadi’s work is a visual response to the colonization, occupation, and cultural and identity-based erasure of contested territories.
Born in the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel, Safadi grew up in a context where the political dimension is never an abstract concept, but a daily condition. Her art originates from this: from the need to preserve, reaffirm, and etch what risks being expelled from the dominant narrative. Her prints and compositions are acts of active memory, where paper, the mark, and materials become tools to reclaim a collective and individual existence that is denied or silenced.
In her works, the landscape is a symbolic battlefield, a contested map, a surface to be reclaimed through the artistic gesture. In this sense, Safadi does not merely represent places; she transforms them into political territories. Her images—suspended between figuration and abstraction—tell of erosion, fragmentation, but also permanence and reclamation. The introduction of salt into her works, for example, is not merely aesthetic: that dust which settles on the paper suggests the evaporation of memory, the fog of absence, but also the sedimentation of a presence that refuses to vanish.
Salt, an organic and earthly material, thus becomes a metaphor for survival and testimony. Like printmaking—a technique that requires time, patience, and pressure—salt also evokes the slow work of memory, the repeated and obstinate gesture that leaves a trace. In this dialogue between material and meaning, Safadi’s work takes on a form of poetic activism: it constructs alternative spaces where the hegemonic narrative is challenged with resilient and profound images.
In her works, biography becomes geography, and geography becomes a symbolic terrain of resistance. Every etched mark is a political act, every layer of colour a form of insubordination. Her artistic practice is, in every respect, a pedagogy of resistance: Safadi teaches not only through education but through the image. Her works interrogate the viewer, forcing them to pause in a suspended time where the Palestinian question is never a “theme,” but an embodied reality. Shada Safadi’s art becomes a subversive act: a language that preserves and interrogates, that resists.
@ Elettra Stamboulis
See more https://shadasafadi.com/
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