"Be a tree brimming with fertility"
This exhibition returns to the ״Venus״ figurines of the Palaeolithic: small bodies that fit in the palm of a hand. In many, facial features and limbs recede as the breasts, belly and hips come to the fore. The exhibition reads these forms as an expression of an ancient human fascination with the body’s capacity to give life. From this starting point, it considers the fertility that binds human beings to the earth, making human renewal an extension of the earth’s own.
Within this relationship, fertility emerges as the force through which life continues, a law of nature that human beings cannot change. The earth holds the seeds that will make it green again; the body carries within it the means of its survival and continuation. Life persists through its inherent capacity to sprout, give birth and create—a capacity greater than any attempt to bring it to a halt.
This fertility extends to the human imagination and to the art and knowledge we create. Through language, image and music, our presence reaches further, and our influence endures in the culture passed from one generation to the next. This continuity underpins the exhibition: renewal is inherent in life. What one person creates is received and built upon by others; in this way, one act of creation opens the way for another.
These ideas take material form in sculptures and installations that explore endurance and relationships of support. In the work by Doaa Badran presented here, two heavy ceramic masses, resembling mounds of flesh, wrap around a wooden table leg. One rests on the floor while the other hangs upside down, the gap between them keeping the composition charged with tension. The work strips the table leg of its familiar supporting role and its associations with home and stability, unsettling the distinction between what carries and what is carried. Out of this ambiguity, the sagging, fragmented body emerges as a structure that supports itself and resists collapse. Wholeness remains beyond its reach, yet it retains the capacity to survive; its cohesion reveals the power to endure.
Suma Kaedan’s installation ״Green Gold״ engages with the exhibition’s theme of fertility through knowledge as a connection to place and memory, renewed through practice and transmission. At the centre of the exhibition space stands a mound of earth incorporating tufts of wool and soil collected from Baqa al-Gharbiyye and the surrounding valleys, evoking ancient practices of herding and building. Wild za’atar shoots emerge from its cracks, carrying accumulated knowledge of the land and its plants, embodying the power of renewal amid an arid landscape and a bond with the land that endures in the face of borders and surveillance. This idea extends to paper, which shifts from a surface holding seeds to a medium for germination and propagation, and to a video displayed on a rock, documenting foraging at the site of Khubbeiza, a village whose inhabitants were displaced. Through these elements, ״green heritage״ emerges as living knowledge that preserves the intertwined memories of people and land—a memory shaped by inhabiting a place and engaging with its plants, sustained by putting this knowledge into practice and passing it on.
Alaa Ghassan uses textiles as a language for exploring the relationship between body and place, and the life people bring to a place through their relationships and creativity. In her project ״May Your Home Flourish״, the home takes the form of a circular seating arrangement where iron rods intersect with colourful threads, embodying family unity and the role of gathering in bringing a home to life. This bond between body and place continues in ״Rooted״, where a red woollen thread rises vertically through the space, linking the body to architecture and affirming presence and belonging. In ״Hollyhock Blossom״, she turns to natural forms, recreating the flower’s layers and texture through freehand drawing. Their expression in textiles brings nature’s fertility into contact with the human capacity to create.
Basma Bader brings this dialogue to a close with works that examine the body’s ties to family and land, and the roles and constraints passed down through generations. In the video ״No One Will Know You״, she draws on a poem by Zahi Wahbi to explore her relationship with her niece and the personal and gendered conflicts that run through it, inherited within the family. Sound and image combine with a symbolic vocabulary of pomegranate slices, a cage, a hair comb and drawing directly on the wall. Reflections on youth and old age sit alongside the human closeness that endures under the weight of social conventions. In another video work, the artist turns to the relationship with the mother, examining gender roles and maternal bonds. Ambient sounds intertwine with the image of the artist caressing a cow’s heart in her lap, in a sensory encounter that explores the boundaries between living and dead bodies. Her sculptural project ״Local Stones״ moves from family relationships to questions of ownership and bodily sovereignty. She carves vulval forms into stones gathered from her father’s land and uses them to build a ״sinsileh״, a traditional stone wall that can be broken down by water and erosion. Echoing traditional methods of marking land boundaries, the work connects sexual identity with property rights. The boundaries of the land become a way of questioning those imposed on the body, and who has the authority to draw and fix them in place.
These works share a vision of earth and body as sites of transformation, resistance and healing. Through the forms and relationships the artists create, material becomes a language that speaks of wounds and renewal. In the tension between fertility and fracture, toxicity and healing, separation and connection, creation emerges as an ongoing act through which we reshape our relationships with the earth, our bodies and what we inherit. Nature’s fertility thus meets the fertility of the imagination, and art becomes a practice of persistence: a means of renewing our presence in the world and giving it forms that defy erasure.
Participating Artists
Doaa Badran (Kabul, Western Galilee) is a multidisciplinary Palestinian artist whose practice merges art, research, and education. She is the founder and director of Halqa Art Studio and co-founder of Shahinat Burtuqal, a digital platform dedicated to Palestinian contemporary visual arts. Her work explores themes of existence, fate, and identity through historical and material narratives. Badran holds degrees in visual arts and jewelry design and has worked as a lecturer at the University of Haifa. She has participated in exhibitions both locally and internationally.
Al-Lat
Unfolds as a suspended body inscribed within the form of a monumental scroll. The drawing fuses manuscript and flesh, transforming the paper into a visceral anatomical surface.
The figure’s multiple breasts swell like clustered dates—simultaneously nourishment, burden, and historical accumulation. Rather than embodying idealized fertility, the body bears an unsettling weight. It stands precariously on a single leg, the other severed, destabilizing its mythic authority.
By refiguring Al-Lat as a fragile, excessive, materially grounded body, the work shifts the deity from transcendence to corporeality. Divinity here is neither pure nor stable; it is layered, ingestible, historical, and exposed.
Untitled
The work stands as a tense column: two heavy ceramic masses, resembling accumulated folds of sagging flesh, each wrapped around a turned wooden table leg. One rests heavily on the ground, while the other hangs upside down from above. The ends of the two legs extend towards one another in an attempt to meet that remains incomplete. They stop at a critical distance before touching, creating a charged void between them, suspended between connection and rupture, and marked by the impossibility of completion.
The table in this work exceeds its function as a piece of domestic furniture, becoming a symbol and a space for an entire social structure, one within which identity takes shape and around which communities gather - from the intimacy of family and shared gatherings to the wider formations of society and peoplehood. It embodies continuity through gathering, fertility, reproduction, and the succession of generations. When the table leg is removed from its primary function of bearing weight and providing support, and becomes integrated with the ceramic body, a visual ambiguity emerges around the logic of support. It is no longer clear whether the wood supports the body, whether the body bears the wood, or whether the two have become a single structure.
Despite the body’s weight, fragmentation, and the destabilisation of the familiar system of support, it does not collapse. It remains upright and suspended, capable of bearing its own weight.
Suma Kaedan (Baqa al-Gharbiyye) is a multidisciplinary visual artist, a therapist specialising in body psychotherapy, a lecturer and an initiator of cultural projects. She is co-founder of the ״Orange Truck״ association and founder and director of ״Studio Noon״, a space for art and therapy. She holds a master’s degree in visual arts from the University of Haifa. She has taught and coordinated visual arts and graphic design programmes at several schools and lectured at the University of Haifa. She has participated in exhibitions locally and internationally, taken part in international artist residencies and received several art awards.
Green Gold
The installation is built around a visual and sensory relationship between the concepts of land and soil, and the meanings each carries. At the centre of the exhibition space stands a low mound of earth, evoking the connection between land and memory, and between what the land brings forth and what is uprooted from it, within the context of the ongoing struggle over it. The mound contains soil samples collected from Baqa al-Gharbiyye and the neighbouring valleys, alongside tufts of sheep’s wool that recall longstanding practices associated with building, herding, and living off the land. From cracks in the barren soil, wild thyme shoots emerge. The plant appears not merely as a natural element, but as a bearer of inherited knowledge, everyday practice, and an ongoing connection to the land.
Beside the mound, recycled paper becomes another kind of ground, carrying thyme seeds, as well as pages documenting the plant’s varieties and forms, preserving knowledge and both personal and collective memory. Among the thyme seedlings, a rock made of paper occupies the centre of the space. A film is projected onto its surface, documenting the artist picking thyme in the Khubeizeh area, as seen from above through the eye of a drone. The work revisits picking as an inherited form of knowledge and a direct relationship with the plant, while also revealing how this practice has been transformed by borders and surveillance.
By bringing together soil, plants, paper, and moving images, Green Gold builds a material archive of a memory rooted in the land. Here, thyme carries folk knowledge, family memory, and everyday practices, bearing witness to a relationship with the land that is increasingly threatened by change and rupture. In this way, sprouting becomes an act of preservation, and replanting becomes an attempt to reclaim part of the “green heritage” and keep it alive in both place and memory.
Alaa Ghassan, born and based in Jaffa, where I live and work. I study Industrial Design at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, while also studying for an Art Teaching Certificate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I work at Al-Mat’hana Gallery in Jaffa and have also led art workshops for school students from elementary through high school.
My artistic and design practice combines industrial design, textiles, crafts, illustration, and product development, with a particular interest in the relationship between people, materials, memory, and local culture. I draw inspiration from everyday life, family heritage, and the surrounding environment. Through my work, I aim to create projects that connect function, human experience, and cultural storytelling. I have participated in local and international academic and artistic projects, as well as design programs and workshops abroad.
I am particularly interested in transforming observations from daily life into functional and engaging design solutions.
Hollyhock Flower
Inspired by the hollyhock flower, this textile work was created using free-motion machine embroidery. The project explores the use of thread as a drawing medium, translating the flower’s forms, textures, and details into layered embroidered compositions that combine observation, craftsmanship, and textile expression.
Darcom ‘Amra
The project Darcom ‘Amra is based on the concept of the Arab home as a place filled with family, guests, and gatherings. Here, a home is not considered “full” because of the objects inside it, but because of the people, relationships, and encounters that bring it to life. For this reason, the seating is designed in a circular form, bringing people together and creating a sense of closeness, continuity, and connection.
The main structure of the work is inspired by a traditional textile inherited within my family, characterized by strong, vibrant colors that have always been present in our home and gatherings. For me, these colors have become symbols of life, strength, and continuity.
The design structure is also inspired by the way weaving itself is constructed: vertical threads cross with horizontal threads, and the textile cannot be complete without their connection.
This idea is translated into the design through iron rods that represent one direction of the threads, while the fabric passes through them in the opposite direction, interweaving to form one unified piece.
Anchored
This textile installation explores the relationship between the individual and architectural space through a large-scale woven structure suspended within the interior. The project was developed in response to the building itself, using textile as a medium to create a physical and visual connection between the body, material, and surrounding architecture.
The woven form extends vertically through the space, emphasizing ideas of connection, presence, and belonging. By anchoring the textile structure to the building, the act of weaving becomes a symbolic gesture of communication and connection, reflecting the way people build relationships with the spaces they inhabit and experience. The color red is used as a symbol of the continuity of life within the building, highlighting human presence and the energy embedded in the space.
This interweaving becomes an image of the family: each person is like an individual thread, but through connection with others, they become part of one strong and unified fabric. In this way, the seating becomes a space that reinterprets the meaning of connection through the act of sitting together.
The phrase “Darcom ‘Amra”, traditionally said to guests as a wish for their home to remain filled with goodness and people, summarizes the message of the project: a home comes alive through those who gather within it, just as a textile becomes complete through the coming together of its threads.
Basma Bader (Hurfeish)
A multidisciplinary artist, she holds a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from the University of Haifa and studied group facilitation at the Open University. Her experience spans group facilitation, youth work, and art education. She managed a youth centre in Hurfeish, worked at several museums in Haifa, and co-founded the “Keys to Haifa” programme for the Arab community. She has participated in exhibitions locally and internationally. Her work stems from reflections on her personal experience and surroundings, exploring questions of identity, sex, and gender, as well as her relationship with her mother and hometown, and the meanings of place and memory.
No One Will Know You
The work takes as its starting point a poem by the poet Zahi Wehbe, exploring the artist’s relationship with her niece and the personal and gendered conflicts that run through it and are passed down within the family. Sound and image come together with symbolic elements such as pomegranate seeds, a cage, and a hairbrush, alongside drawing directly onto the wall. Reflections on youth and old age unfold alongside a human closeness that persists under the weight of social conventions.
The raised forms are made from a material that disintegrates when exposed to water, echoing the effects of rain and erosion and their capacity to alter the contours of the land. By revisiting this vernacular practice of marking boundaries, the work connects gender identity to the right to bodily autonomy. The boundaries of the land become a point of departure for questioning the boundaries imposed on the body, and who holds the power to draw and enforce them.
Untitled Video
The work uses visual symbols to open a dialogue with the artist’s mother about their relationship, maternal bonds, and inherited sex and gender roles. The artist cradles the heart of a dead cow and caresses it as though it were alive, creating a sensory encounter that explores the boundaries between living and dead bodies within a circular dialogue that recurs throughout the work. These scenes are interwoven with sounds from her local surroundings, evoking the gendered and social norms that shape the world around her.
Local Stones
The work forms raised vulva shapes on stones collected from the artist’s father’s land, arranging them into a stone sinsileh - a traditional dry-stone boundary wall. This structure recalls the stone walls used by previous generations to mark land boundaries and establish ownership, evoking the underlying disputes surrounding borders and the rights of those who claim them.
Curator: Rula Khoury | Producer: Sham Abu Saleh | Graphic Design: Ahmad Hleiwa | Exhibition Design: Ahmad Asaad | Technical Management: Marwan Satal | Director: Mahmoud Abu Arisha