‘1030+’
The exhibition title comes from the number of days since the start of Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza at the time of the show’s opening. But, as the artist explained in a statement: “These works are not about war or life as events, but about humans after the events have faded, if they do at all. It’s about an existence suspended between earth and sky, where the body remains a witness, and the shared air remains the last link between us.”
‘Oh My Gaza’
In one of his poems, the Palestinian writer Ziad Khaddash imagined that “the children would be temporarily elevated to the skies until the war ends.” In these works, Rana Anani writes in her introduction to the exhibition, Hourani does just that, depicting the clouds as “a safe haven offering refuge from bombing and destruction, a place to search for the childhood the Earth has denied them.”
‘Shrouded in Blue’
In this work, we see a dead child in a blue shroud “suspended in the sky above a city razed to the ground.” In such pieces, “Hourani’s canvases become spaces of spiritual reflection, where the clouds form a transparent veil separating the Earth and sky, a shore between life and death, or a hidden world parallel to our own,” Anani writes. “In Hourani’s clouds, we see how our inner worlds are shaped by pain, and how imagination becomes a last refuge.”
