In feels like yesterday, her second solo exhibition, Reem R. unfolds a quiet, intimate inquiry into memory, nostalgia, and the layered textures of belonging.
feels like yesterday opens with a series of paintings where still life becomes a charged terrain, one where the personal and the political converge in gestures at once ordinary and symbolic. Reem R.’s compositions, rendered with hyperrealism, draw from the visual language of figurative painting while grounding themselves in the tactile rituals of everyday life. Across these intimate scenes, fruit emerges as a central motif, as bearer of memory, identity, and inheritance. Each object is imbued with the weight of nostalgia for the childhood home and the homeland both longed for and persistently present, evoking a Palestinian visual lexicon that is at once deeply rooted and quietly radical.
In works such as The Orange Peel, Her seeds are in the ground, and Peel a pomegranate, she said, the artist meditates on belonging through the symbolic resonance of oranges, watermelon, and pomegranate. These fruits, deeply tied to the Palestinian landscape and history, are recontextualized through acts of peeling and offering. The artist’s own presence, whether implied or direct, merges with the symbolic, transforming the domestic into a site of political reflection. Her brushwork is restrained, precise, and full of intent. Rather than confront, the paintings insist on presence, on repetition, on the power of holding space. These still lifes are anything but still; they hum with the quiet force of what refuses to disappear.
This attention to form, memory, and home extends into the paper series, where the focus shifts from the edible to the ephemeral. Here, Reem R. turns her gaze to paper as a medium of both impermanence and preservation, continuing her exploration of what it means to remember, to remain, and to belong. It is introduced by a small painting, It was a white lie, and culminates in the larger Lilies and Lies, in which vibrant floral stems emerge on paper seemingly crumpled, discarded, then salvaged, evoking memories we attempt to erase but cannot abandon. The lilies are rendered with such hyperreal precision that their perfume seems to linger in the air. But their titles, where lilies dissolve into lies, challenge us to question the stories that images tell, and those they obscure.
The flowers reappear in Carrying you close to my heart, where the artist holds lilies and oranges close to her chest, as if clinging to fragments of the past. Yet the orange peel slips beyond the canvas’s edge, a reminder of the impossibility of fully preserving what is lost. This sense offragmentation intensifies in the self-portraits Hold It and Her, It, where the artist’s body is rendered in pieces—a hand reaching out, a partially reconstructed face. Memory and identity appear as puzzles: crumpled, torn, and reassembled, but never whole. The gaps remain.
The final series is inspired by drawings made by Palestinian children. At first glance, they appear innocent and playful—a little girl (Dima), a flower standing upright (Open, o flower), a woman picking oranges (As the tree). But beneath these surfaces, deeper layers unfold: grief and injustice. A house on fire (But these are not scribbles), a terrified child crouching in a corner (Get away from me), trees falling beneath a weeping eye (The sky is a witness), broken dreams (Returning, Together), and a heartbreaking farewell (With my whole heart). These works transform childlike imagery into potent vessels of mourning, survival, and testimony.
Beneath the luminous surfaces of Reem R.’s paintings lies a quiet defiance—of erasure and of amnesia. feels like yesterday gathers what is at risk of slipping into silence, offering memory not as nostalgia but as a living, unsettled force. Through gesture and symbol, Reem R. creates a space where beauty does not soothe but sharpens, where remembering becomes an act of endurance, and where presence itself becomes a form of resistance.
Press release from Hunna Art
Image: Reem R. Her seeds are in the ground. 2023. Oil painting. 60 x 60 cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Hunna Art
