IN CONVERSATION WITH
The Weight of Memory
SLIMAN MANSOUR AND THE ARTIST AS GUARDIAN OF HERITAGE
by Michèle Anbar
A CONVERSATION FROM JERUSALEM
When I got on a call with Sliman Mansour, he was in Jerusalem. Not Birzeit, where he was born in 1947, nor Bethlehem or Ramallah where much of his life’ s work unfolded— but Jerusalem, the city that has occupied the center of his canvases for over five decades.“ Normal here,” he said, in the unhurried way of a man who has made peace with living inside history.“ We move between the West Bank and Jerusalem. And Gaza is on my mind.”
At 77, Mansour paints with oxygen nearby. Fifty years of smoking have left him with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. Yet the mind is clear, the voice carries weight, and the conversation— conducted for MATAHEF Magazine— moves easily between memory and meaning, between the personal and political, between art made in defiance and art made in devotion.
It is a conversation about what it means to be an artist in a place where identity is threatened every day. And it is, ultimately, a meditation on a question at the heart of MATAHEF’ s third issue: who carries the heritage?
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