 The Artist: Jumana El Husseini was born in Jerusalem in 1932. She studied fine arts in Beirut and Paris. She had her first exhibit in Paris in 1965, and has since had a number of personal exhibits in the majority of Arab countries, Tokyo, Rome, Amman, Jerusalem. El-Husseini has also participated in a number of group exhibits such as the Venice Biennial of 1979, the Tokyo Modern Art Museum, and the Museum of Women in the Arts of Washington in 1994. Her works are in numerous private collections around the world. She participated in the French Palestinian spring exhibit at the Paris Institut du Monde Arabe in 1996, and in the 1998 Stockholm Fine Arts Academy “Palestinian Art” exhibit. Badran received the Palestine Award for the Visual Arts in 1999. She is a member of the Sakakini’s General Assembly and resides in Paris. Her work: El-Husseini’s paintings are dark and grayish, since the Lebanese war of the 70’s, her bright colored paintings depicting the cities of her childhood Jaffa and Jerusalem have become black grayish portrayals of Beirut. El-Husseini has an interesting way of making her paintings. In the 1990’s on her travels to the Middle East, she filled her notebooks with notations on different written forms of native language she encountered. Then she took the texts and wrote them on a large monochrome oil surface and painted over them. She proceeded to repeat these steps with different writing for up to months until an almost metallic surface results which conceals thousands of years of Middle Eastern history in the form of written languages of the native people. For more information on Jumana El-Husseini go to: wwol.inre.asu.edu/el-husseini.html |
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