War shapes people’s socio-political life and, thus, their artistic expressions, and it changes like any other experience. Palestinian artists Malak Mattar, whose lives and experiences with prolonged conflict have been personally affected, depict war as a mirrored experience with details. The experience of war, like other experiences, leaves its imprint, and following it, one can see that it is neither a construction of trauma nor a narrative; worlds beyond it push it forward.
This writing is part of a series that explores conflict and war in art, focusing on Malak Mattar‘s work that examines how Palestinian artists who have personally experienced war visualise and describe ongoing violence. Malak Mattar, born in the Gaza Strip in 1999, comes from a family deeply involved in cultural practices and grew up under military occupation and siege. For the artist, conflict was a daily reality rather than a far-off historical topic. She started painting as a teenager during Operation Protective Edge in 2014. Use art as an immediate response to the destruction around her. The worlds of Malak Mattar, as an artist, are created from war experiences. However, it is not a direct narrative of war, but its atmosphere that prevails.
Since then, Mattar’s creative life has expanded beyond Gaza while remaining inextricably linked to it. Mattar’s artistic worlds develop through layered creations that weave together war experiences and memories of loved ones who died or were injured in the war. From 2018 to 2022, she attended Istanbul Aydın University, where she studied political science. In 2023, she went to Central Saint Martins in London to pursue a Master of Fine Arts. However, the resurgence of violence in Gaza at the time of her move to the UK significantly altered her creative vocabulary. As she turned to greyscale paintings and sketches to address the extent of the devastation in her homeland, the vibrant colours that had typified much of her earlier work lost place to bleak monochrome compositions. In the end, these pieces came together to form No Words, a massive composition that aims to graphically convey the extent of Palestinians’ pain, destruction, and displacement.
In addition, Mattar writes and uses books to tell stories. Her children’s novel Sitti’s Bird (2021), which has a large readership, is based on cultural history and personal memory. Although many Palestinians face severe travel restrictions, Mattar’s artwork has been widely displayed in Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas.
Her exhibitions in cities throughout Palestine, Costa Rica, the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Germany, Lebanon, Portugal, and Italy reflect the increasing international interest in modern Palestinian art and the worldwide circulation of her work. Most recently, No Words, exhibited in London in 2024, solidifies Mattar’s standing among a group of artists whose work turns firsthand accounts into a potent visual archive of survival and conflict.
Conflict and art
Mattar and his family, who had survived the four bombardments conducted by Israel in Gaza, migrated to Malaysia and later returned to Gaza in 2006. However, when Israel launched another attack in 2007, it gave Malak Mattar extensive war experience. Following the 2014 attack, which resulted in many losses, Mattar began creating representations of those who were lost. The artist, saying, ‘I didn’t want to wait for my murder. I wanted to do something,’ is actually not only opening the gate to her artistic worlds but also transforming art into a means of resistance and a place to preserve memories.
Here we see the artist becoming her own voice. But she also becomes the voice for those who, for various reasons, are unable to express their worlds or visualise them. Through her greyscale paintings and sketches, especially in the ‘No Words’ series, Mattar conveys and reminds us that war, in all its forms, robs people of their voices. It is about giving sound to that voicelessness.
The themes being revealed are the Palestinians’ pain, destruction, and displacement. Beyond stating it directly, it is presented symbolically. It is also a characteristic that the works and their names convey and carry politics in the same way. In the Homeland series, artworks such as Gaza is a Phoenix (2025), Northern Gaza Reuniting with Southern Gaza after a Fragile Ceasefire (2025), and Scenes of Return (2025) can be seen as explicit reactions against war. Passing through Gaza is a Phoenix, it may feel like going through the problems of Gaza. By anchoring a Patton tank at the centre of this composition and presenting the upheaval of life around it, the artist strongly declares the politics. The works in this series, Morning in Gaza (2021), Another Gaza Morning (2021), If Only I Could Fit My Home in My Suitcase (2020), My Mother, My Hearth, My Land (2020), Framed Memories (2019), Home is in the Heart (2019), simultaneously thematise both home and the losses in the Gaza region. In the work Taking My Country With Me (2017), the country is described as a memory kept in the Heart. The artist declares that it is not geography destroyed by bombing, but a memory that lies deep within.
After studying abroad and returning home, Mattar actually finds herself caught in a conflict. It is not easy to understand the severity of how your relationship to home can be distorted by this nightmare that is the siege and the bombings when it is mentioned. The artist herself has described returning home as “your first pain and your biggest pain.” While the home is full of great nostalgia and shelter, it also carries memories of war experiences and bombings. The home comes across as something that could be destroyed at any time. Most of the painting was completed during the bombings. That is not exactly reflected in the paintings. The paintings are actually memories of the dead, the homes and surroundings destroyed by the falling bombs.
In the land where bombs fall, constantly being destroyed, and where existence itself is questioned, the artist represents these atmospheres simultaneously and creates a shelter to escape from them. The artist says that art should be done peacefully, yet this is the art of an unsettled time. Here, as mentioned in the work ‘My mother My homeland’, the house and mother become one, and the mother herself transforms into the homeland.
The artist says that Israel completely destroyed his family within minutes. The pain created by being wiped out in moments is a lifelong memory. War is the story and memory of losing loved ones and many other cherished things. In the artist’s statement for the painting My Mother (2021), Mattar writes that it is about the time ‘when only a mother’s embrace was a refuge.’ The artist laments that everything else had become unprotected. That embrace functions as a politically significant one, especially against the backdrop of war experiences, becoming an artistic creation that accumulates memories of it. A mother is home, refuge, and embrace; it is a politically charged act that has matured within a canvas.
Mattar documented the attacks that occurred in 2021 and presented them as an installation, combining footage of the attacks with materials from the destroyed buildings and streets.
The series No Words (2024), the exhibition takes its name from a poem by Mahmoud Darwish, because of the historic painting at its core, closely examines the ongoing violence experienced by the Palestinian people. The two are similar in that they both attempt, with burned fingers, to tenderly grasp the agonising, damaged character of home. It is the practice of continually trying to keep something cherished together while it crumbles into ash. The horse, a recurring theme in both poetry and painting, serves as a metaphor and a burden-bearer for what has been unbearable. Mahmoud Darwish came from the Galilean town of al-Birwa, which the Israeli army destroyed and ethnically cleansed in 1948. Along with her own experiences, the artist is incorporating Darwish’s, which are similar to hers.
The No Words is Malak Mattar’s largest piece to date, composed of eerie scenes that everyone has seen on social media, in the news, or in eagerly anticipated letters from loved ones, and aims to erase these lived experiences—which cannot be forgotten—from time rather than to provide hope. The entire painting is held together in the centre by a massive screaming horse. Its twisted mouth gives the inarticulate quiet form. It pulls a child-driven cart.
Her statelessness previously enhanced her feeling of belonging within strong familial ties and enduring friendships as a Palestinian. This produces an atmosphere that is both strong and prophetic. Her vibrant early paintings emphasise the closeness and cosiness of family and community, but a drastic change in circumstances led her work to shift. The family scenes were replaced with horrific apocalyptic imagery, mirroring scenes streamed and consumed worldwide via social media, and her colour palette was depleted. Her perspective on the world seemed altered by the experience of being a stranger in a distant country, cut off from her family and home, which were in grave danger. Here is narrated the subsequent history of being silenced, completely erased, and destroyed. What is left are the decays of home and memories.
Mattar’s artworks are a powerful voice in contemporary Palestine. They examine the region of Palestine, the struggles of its people, and the journeys, migrations, and misfortunes of homelessness in spaces beyond the confines of art. The war experiences and the wounds inflicted by war are presented with the same intensity. However, none of this is depicted or envisioned against the backdrop of a river of blood. In a way, Palestinian life continues alongside the ongoing war and fighting. Mattar’s art can be said to represent, on many levels, the aspirations and defences of a people who carry on with life even as people die in attacks, the land and homes are lost, and even their identity is in trouble.
feature image: Gaza is a Phoenix by Malak Mattar (credit: malak-mattar.com)
Krispin Joseph PX, a poet and journalist, completed an MFA in art history and visual studies at the University of Hyderabad and an MA in sociology and cultural anthropology from the Central European University, Vienna.
