Personal Info
- Country of residence: Palestine
Information
Abd al-Hai Musalim Zarara is a Palestinian/Jordanian artist. He was born in the village of Al-Dawayma in Hebron in 1933 and died on August 1, 2020 in the city of Amman. He became a natural artist and did not receive art in his institutes. He held more than 35 solo Arab and international exhibitions. Many journalists and critics wrote about him in Arab and foreign newspapers and magazines, discussing his special technique using a mixture of sawdust and glue, from which the artist made his most beautiful paintings. Following the Sabra and Shatila massacre, he and thirty-three Japanese artists held an exhibition in Tokyo on the subject of the massacre that occurred in Lebanon in 1982.
His upbringing and artistic beginnings
About the artist Abdul Hay Muslim, the critic Muhammad Abu Zureiq wrote: “From the depths of the Palestinian village, Abdul Hay Muslim came out laden with songs, mawwals, meghnas, and reproaches, which will be an important element in his artistic works. These are works of an innate nature that presented themselves easily and easily, because they were committed to the Palestinian cause.” With self-belief and a visionary approach, I gained honesty in performance. He is an innate artist who expressed the memory of the Palestinian place in all its mythological and historical dimensions, evoking customs and traditions, legendary figures and oral and non-verbal folklore, benefiting from a rich memory of childhood details in the Palestinian village, poetry and folk epics, and Samar and wedding songs, recording all of this in a beautiful artistic language. »
Abdul Hai Muslim was born in 1933 in the village of Al-Dawayma, in the district of Hebron, Palestine. Like other Palestinian people, he left it in 1948, when he was fifteen years old. Muslim worked in many professions and never thought about being an artist before he reached his fourth decade, and after being exposed to a series of tragedies and exiles. Muslim expressed his emotions first in clay, and then in glue and wood paste in the form of recessed and embossed sculptures. He worked in the Jordanian army for a few years before resigning and joining the Palestine Liberation Organization, which sent him and his family to Libya. The desolation of the Libyan desert increased his pain and alienation, so he discovered a different field of resistance through beautiful and serious works of art, and he continued the experiment. His works include relief and intaglio sculpture, where he discovered his favorite material of glue and sawdust, mixed them in certain proportions, and treated them with simple sculptural tools (with which he later began shaping bodies and objects. Within months, he completed a significant group of works, which were collected in... Its technique is between painting and sculpture, and he participated in it in the Tripoli International Fine Arts Exhibition in 1971, and from this date his long artistic career began.
Abu Zureiq writes, “Thus Abdel Hay is involved in a path open to the unknown, and he has no artistic weapons except simplicity and common sense, which do not proceed from any previous reference (he did not study drawing under a professor from Italy or from France, so his hand remained simply Palestinian and original) so he did not It was strange that he gave an eloquent answer when asked about his date of birth when he said: “My real birth was in 1970 when I started drawing.” Thus, his first stop would be Tripoli in the West, then Beirut and Damascus, then he would travel with his exhibitions in various parts of the Arab world and international capitals, forming a network of relationships. Artistic art is spread throughout the globe, and he is welcomed and celebrated for his innate and sincere works, which infiltrate the soul, regardless of its affiliation, with ease and ease.”
His works
The beginnings were simple works, consisting of a human element in a Palestinian uniform. Then his painting/sculpture developed to express figures, scenes, battles, and complex formations. Then came symbols, mythical animals, mythical worlds, poetic writings, songs, and various tools, such as weapons, the flute, the plough, harvesting tools, utensils, and trees. Such as palm trees, cactus, pomegranates, grapes, and olives, all of which are used in artistic work to express an aesthetic and ideological discourse, and both discourses support each other. Muslim relies on his simple nature and honest sense, and therefore his works are easy to receive, appreciated by the intellectual and the simple person, do not require any affectation in interpretation or interpretation, and are rich in their connotations and revelations. The majority of the artist’s works tell the story of his childhood in his occupied village (Al-Dawayma), his displacement in exile and diaspora, and his ending with the loss and brokenness of dreams, and all of this in a stream of flowing and haunting memories, made with his golden paste, to chronicle and document the private and the public, in the cohesion and connection between art and man, and so on ( His works are full of human groups, similar to the legendary rituals of the ancient Canaanites, where the alignment of figures is witnessed, as if they were moving within a single rhythm...his painting constitutes a visual narrative of what he remembers). He creates popular characters and deals with them with great sympathy. He embroiders the Palestinian dress with colors, and mixes the rich written text with the sculptural formations. Scenes and experiences based on customs, traditions, history and the future have an epic, miraculous breath. Muslim is a purely documentary artist and his collection of works is an integrated library of the traditional and popular history of Palestine before 1948 and its history of struggle and resistance after 1948. In a press interview, Muslim says: (I lived in the village for fifteen years before the migration, and I sought to document the memory of that village. I am trying to present the memory. In most of what I work, every morning I enter the studio and feel myself returning to the village, and inspecting the works hanging on the walls, which represent part of daily life embedded in my memory.
Palestinian popular heritage in his works
The artist published his book “Palestinian Popular Heritage in the Works of the Artist Abdel-Hay Muslim Zarara” in 2005, which contains more than forty detailed works with images and texts (Arabic, English, and German) about life in the Palestinian village, especially Al-Dawayma, Palestinian fashions, and popular proverbs and songs. Between reproach and flirtation, love and longing, return from the fields, Chigurh’s Day, and others, the artist wrote, “Part of the works I completed from the Heritage series are works that are not large in size. Each work contains one, two, or three people. It is inspired by popular song, and I have, or tried to, understand the content of these songs and in relation to them. The people who memorize these songs, whether men or women, recite them in individual concerts, on harvest days, during the olive harvest season, while plowing the land, or during the day of the day. From Samer’s songs, “Dabkeh,” “Tarawid,” “Hadra,” and “Zarif Al-Toul” and a drawing:
Khasha of the house, Hanna of the bride, the bride’s wedding on the camel, the bride in the groom’s house - the wedding night, the girls’ dance, the groom and the bride, the popular Dabkeh, the popular poet, Ramadan fasting, a return from the grape and fig vineyards, and others.
opposed
Abdelhay Musallam’s works have been exhibited in international personal and group exhibitions. The most recent of which is the Sharjah Art Biennial, a personal exhibition in Sharjah as well, and exhibitions at the Jordanian National Museum of Fine Arts, Darat al Funun, the Fine Artists Association, Dar al-Anda, and Zara Gallery, all in the city of Amman, where he resides. His works were also displayed at the Jean Genet Gallery in Nottingham, United Kingdom, and at the New Museum in New York City in the “Here and There” exhibitions and the “Tense and Unintentional Evidence of Love for the Land” exhibition, curated by the artist Alaa Younis, who has been working with him to document his works and collect and digitize his documents since Year 2003.
His death
He died on August 1, 2020 in the Jordanian capital, Amman, at the age of 87, and he was mourned by the Palestinian Ministry of Culture.
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Achievements and Awards
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