Zawyeh Gallery is proud to announce the opening of The Promise, a solo exhibition by renowned Palestinian artist Bashir Makhoul. The exhibition will open on 13 April 2025 in the presence of the artist and will continue until 30 June 2025.
In The Promise, Makhoul unveils his latest works, exploring themes of home, displacement, and memory through intricate visual narratives. The exhibition title encapsulates a poetic and ambiguous statement of intent—an assertion that is both an event and a transformation. A promise is made and, inevitably, can be broken. This duality is at the heart of Makhoul’s practice, where creation and fragmentation, completion and rupture, coexist.
At the core of the exhibition is the recurring motif of the house, depicted in its most elemental form: a cube with a door and a window. These geometric structures, arranged in dense and chaotic formations, reflect the overcrowded conditions of refugee camps and marginalised communities. Despite their elegant color palettes, the artworks reveal a stark contrast between aesthetic beauty and unsettling political realities.
Among the featured series is Fractured Oblivion, an extension of his earlier Promise series. Scattered blossom petals—once symbols of unity—now encircle dark voids that echo bullet holes Makhoul photographed in Beirut in the 1990s. The war-torn surfaces evoke his family’s exile during the Nakba, while the petals suggest healing, and the voids, as the title implies, lead to oblivion.
The themes of rupture and continuity extend into the Skein series, where tangled threads symbolize exile and return. Works such as Drift and Density (3) explore the Palestinian experience of loss and perseverance, with Density (3) standing as a testament to a fragmented nation bound together by resilience and solidarity.
Makhoul’s latest experiments in electroplated 3D printing introduce an unexpected crystalline structure within his house formations. This approach reaches its pinnacle in My Olive Tree, where geometric structures take on the spectral form of an ancient olive tree—a personal symbol for the artist, standing between two parcels of land he does not own.
The olive tree, much like the Palestinian people, waits—embodying persistence and the inevitable fulfillment of the promise to return. The Promise offers a powerful meditation on identity, displacement, and resilience, marking Bashir Makhoul’s first solo exhibition in Dubai.
Press release from Zawyeh Gallery
Image: Bashir Makhoul. Skein Blue. 2023. Oil on canvas. 61 x 61 cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Zawyeh Gallery
