Monther Jawabreh
Body to Body with Memory
Monther Jawabreh [b. 1976, Arroub refugee camp, West Bank, Palestine] is a visual artist, painter, and printmaker who lives and works in Bethlehem. He graduated from Al-Najah National University, Nablus in 2001 and he participated in many solo and group exhibitions. His intense and layered body of work is the result of deep research into the relationship between body and territory, image and memory, representation and power. Jawabreh does not conceive of art as a refuge, but as an action: a form of resistance that uses visual language to interrogate injustice and assert a silenced truth.
Jawabreh imbues his work with the weight and strength of an existence marked by colonisation, military occupation, and internal exile. His biography is not just a context, but an expressive matrix: the direct experience of deprivation, structural violence and instability translates into images that do not represent suffering, but process it, transform it, and etch it onto paper and canvas like indelible marks.
Jawabreh’s artistic language is characterised by extreme versatility: painting, printmaking, installation, and performance coexist in a practice that does not shy away from engaging with material or with time. His works often use ancient techniques -such as linoleum print or drawing- but are charged with a contemporary tension that makes them visual urgencies. Erased or overlapping bodies and faces repeat in his works, like ghosts of a population that is always present yet constantly rendered invisible.
Jawabreh confronts the violence of representation. In his works, occupation is not just a geopolitical fact, but a system that also acts upon the imaginary, on the right to be represented. His images seek to break this dynamic, restoring dignity and complexity to those who are reduced to statistical figures or media icons. It is not about illustrating Palestine, but about embodying it: in the drawn flesh, in oxidised colors, in worn surfaces.
In his more recent projects, Jawabreh has also questioned the very concept of borders, creating altered maps, deconstructed geographical charts, or shattered identity symbols. These works clearly reveal a poetic and radical practice capable of imagining other ways of inhabiting, resisting, and existing.
His artistic gesture does not seek consensus, but truth. Every mark is a declaration, every void is an open wound, every figure is a witness to a present that cannot be ignored. Thus, painting becomes not only a language but testimony; image and political body simultaneously. In a context where Palestinian identity is constantly questioned, erased, or exiled, the art of Monther Jawabreh is an act of survival and insubordination. A way to literally carve into the world.
© Elettra Stamboulis
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