IN CONVERSATION WITH
A VISUAL LANGUAGE BUILT FROM THE GROUND UP
The olive tree. The orange grove. The embroidered dress. The Dome of the Rock emerging from stone terraces. These are not merely decorative choices in Sliman Mansour’ s work— they are a deliberately constructed visual vocabulary, built over decades from foundational sources he identifies with precision.
“ We drew from ancient history,” he explains,“ Canaanite art, regional art— ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian. Then Islamic art, especially Arabic calligraphy. Then Palestinian heritage— the traditional Palestinian dress and embroidery. And the Palestinian landscape itself: the terraced hillsides, the farmland, the village architecture. The landscape became an element of Palestinian heritage.”
This was not arbitrary. When Mansour began his artistic practice in the late 1960s, Palestinian identity was, in his words,“ completely obscured.” Having lived under Jordanian administration from 1948 to 1967, an entire generation had been educated without reference to Palestinian identity. Every textbook, every public space, every official ceremony bore the Jordanian royal seal.“ There was a kind of confusion about identity,” he recalls.“ We didn’ t fully know we were Palestinian.”
The Israeli occupation of 1967 did not erase that confusion immediately— but it created the conditions for a reckoning. Around 1971, artists began to gather, drawn together by a shared awareness that something needed to be named, preserved, and expressed. The first exhibition in Jerusalem after 1967, organized by Nabil Anani, brought together painters who had studied in Cairo, Baghdad, and elsewhere— artists who suddenly recognized one another as a community with collective purpose.
“ The landscape became an element of Palestinian heritage. The village, the architecture, the terraced hillside— these were not just scenery. They were identity.”
ART AS RESISTANCE: THE POLITICS OF MATERIAL
By 1973, Mansour and his colleagues had co-founded the League of Palestinian Artists— the first organized effort to assert the existence of Palestinian visual culture. Their first collective exhibition in Jerusalem in 1975 was both a declaration and a provocation. Israeli authorities responded accordingly: when Mansour held his first solo exhibition in Ramallah in 1980, soldiers arrived within six hours, confiscated the keys, and shut everything down.
“ They went to the strongest person in the village— like in Ottoman times,” Mansour says dryly.“ Just to intimidate people. They knew I was one of the driving forces behind the whole movement.”
The response, in 1987, was radical: the founding of the New Visions movement, which called on Palestinian artists to boycott Israeli-supplied art materials and turn instead to local substances— mud, coffee, henna, clay, the earth itself. The move was as political as it was artistic, a declaration that Palestinian creativity would not be mediated through Israeli commerce.
“ Mud was a tool of choice,” Mansour explains.“ It was a piece of Palestinian land. Using mud, I created symbols of identity that celebrated Palestinian culture. And as it dried and cracked, the mud captured something else— the fragmentation in the Palestinian political landscape.”
His most iconic work from this period— Jamal al-Mahamel, the“ Camel of Burdens”— depicts a stooped porter whose load is Jerusalem itself: the entire city carried on one man’ s back. Reproduced as posters, cards, and stickers, distributed in defiance of military confiscations, the image became one of the most recognized icons of Palestinian resistance. It is the kind of work that escapes its frame and enters collective memory.
1990, Children of Jerusalem
1979, Yaffa
34 MATAHEF ISSUE 03