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<\/p>\nYou will find the Holy Land depicted with breathtaking subtlety on the walls of churches and galleries across Europe. But Jerusalem and Bethlehem, in the Western imagination, tend to look more like Italy’s Urbino or Siena, than Middle Eastern towns occupied for 2,000 years by a melting pot of communities, including Palestinian Christians. Now spread across the Israeli and Palestinian territories, the Holy Land, sacred to Judaism, Islam and Christianity, has exercised generations of artists and ideologues, who have made and remade it in their own image.<\/p>\n
However, for the Palestinian artist Dima Srouji, The Holy Land is simply home\u2014the site of childhood memories, \u201cboth good and bad\u201d, she says. Her show, A Cosmogram of Holy Views, which opens today at London\u2019s Ab Anbar Gallery, is the product of a decade\u2019s worth of research into the built heritage of Palestinian Christians, and a lifetime\u2019s experience of life under Israeli occupation.<\/p>\n
It has at its heart what the artist describes as \u201cthe cognitive dissonance\u201d between the way the outside world views her home and \u201cthe reality on the ground\u201d, which she has represented here with quiet directness. In works of great visual power, she juxtaposes the myth with the reality. Making virtuosic use of multiple media\u201490s polaroids and Renaissance praedellas, as well as blown glass, carved stone and moulded wax objects that were hand-made in Palestine\u2014she flirts constantly with a dark, surreal comedy.<\/p>\n
In a series of tinted glass collages, European paintings are overlaid with scenes of modern life in Palestine. In Return to Nazareth, grandiose frescos of the Holy Family\u2019s homecoming after Herod\u2019s massacre of the innocents form the backdrop for an image from Srouji\u2019s own childhood in the city. The artist\u2019s infant skin is seen turning purple due to lack of air, at a time, during the First Gulf War, when few Palestinian children were issued with gas masks.<\/p>\n
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Dima Srouji, A Cosmogram of Holy Views, 2025. Installation view, Ab-Anbar Gallery, London<\/p>\n
Photo: Sergey Novikov.\u00a0Image courtesy of the artist and Ab-Anbar Gallery<\/p>\n
Other works draw on Srouji\u2019s careful documentation of Palestinian heritage\u2014stone quarries, mother-of-pearl makers, and unbuilt churches\u2014a heritage which she describes as little-studied. Today, following years of war in Gaza, and amid the as yet untested ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, that heritage remains at risk.<\/p>\n
Though there are still thriving craft industries across Palestine\u2019s West Bank, the practice of Palestinian artisans has been changed by decades of violence and occupation. Traditionally, they would use mother of pearl, brought from the Red or Dead Seas, to make reliquaries for churches around the world.<\/p>\n
In A Cosmogram, Srouji has used the same mother of pearl techniques to make a model of her grandparents\u2019 \u201ccompletely ordinary\u201d house in Nazareth. Her grandmother, twice displaced by conflict, evidently tended the house with great care, but today Srouji describes Nazareth as \u201can unliveable city\u201d. \u201cNo-one will ever live in that house again,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
\u201cI am playing with what is sacred,\u201d she explains, pointing to a series of reimagined stone-cut shrines, studded with luminous roundels of stained glass. The objects have been left notably, hauntingly empty, because, for Srouji, \u201cwhat\u2019s sacred is the shrine itself\u2014and anyway all the relics have been looted or destroyed\u201d.<\/p>\n
In some of the exhibition\u2019s most compelling works, we are invited to ponder what can be considered holy amid the horror in Gaza, where the gradual withdrawal of Israeli Defence Forces is currently revealing<\/a> still more destruction. Feeling powerless in the face of the slaughter of her friends and relatives, Srouji has spent time in her studio carving, by hand, wax models of human forms.<\/p>\n Dima Srouji, Phantom Votives, 2025. Beeswax, candles, sound by Dirar Kalash<\/p>\n Image courtesy of the artist and Ab-Anbar Gallery<\/p>\n The works are a twist on the long tradition of votive offerings in churches, but, here, \u201cit\u2019s my own votive to the people of Gaza\u201d, she says. Reproduced in 3D using photogrammetry software, some are based on parts of her own body, but others are the dismembered limbs of children who have been killed by Israeli forces. According to Palestinian health authorities, as of October 7 this year, the number of children killed had reached 20,179\u201430% of the total 67,173 deaths<\/a> recorded since the same date in 2023.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s the only thing that has kept me sane these last months during the genocide,\u201d Srouji says. Without flinching, she adds: \u201cThe wax feels like skin\u2014there\u2019s something warm about it.\u201d<\/p>\n It is perhaps the curse of the Palestinian artist today to co-exist so closely with death, but Srouiji\u2019s work is a positive statement of her community\u2019s long existence and heritage. \u201cIt\u2019s much more about Palestinian life than about Palestinian death,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n Underpinned by in-depth academic research into myriad strands of Palestinian culture, A Cosmogram of Holy Views provokes us to interrogate dynamic and ambivalent relationships between myth and history, art and reality, the living and the dead. \u201cI want to push our presence so we are not erased,\u201d says Srouji. \u201cI want to haunt people.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/7be7ffb4ee03c4867a55fdedb86f59b5a6f0e783-2667x4000.jpg\"\/)
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