Palestinian Artists

I AM AN ADVOCATE FOR them all

This artist advocacy is to highlight Palestinian artists invested in their craft through the horror and carnage of their homeland. They are singers, painters, historians, writers, and designers. They are all storytellers through their medium reminding their people they are known and seen and telling the world to notice.

Khrarif

Video Creator

Abed Alfattah Dawood and Hala Altheeb are co-founders of Khrarif. As the manager and creative director respectively, they aim to create audio-visual content that preserves heritage through a growing electronic library to access stories about Palestine and the whole Arab region.

They have a beautiful earth day series, honoring those martyred. They also have a personal history form where you can submit a story that simulates an event that summarizes your relationship with your grandparents.

And they are speaking of the atrocities now with a directness that deserves attention.

Yazana Bosalamah

painter

Yazana Bosalamah is an incredible painter who captures the deep impact of this genocide through compositions at once muddied and stark.

"Complete what our souls have lost.”

There is loss immortalized and hope along with it. The neutral landscape looks barren, the fine lines giving haunting detail to all that is dying, and there is an honoring in this landscape, too.

"when someone survives from under the rubble and when the flakes of the ostrich bloom from the blood of those who stayed under the rubble"

Aya Jamil Khalaf

a singer and fashion designer

Her motivation behind the music she creates and educates is keeping her heritage alive. It is goes further than philosophical value, right now, it is sustenance. It is through Palestinian oral history from the mouths of elderly Palestinian women that Aya documents authentic folklore in her music.

"art and singing is a way that I can express the reality of how I live and how my people live their daily lives." -in an interview with the Middle East Monitor, 2021

In 2021, Aya performed a Palestinian freedom medley in the streets of Jeruselum. It sits as a pinned post on her IG and alongside her other shares of nation ballads and collaborative songs with the older generations, you can hear and feel the love for Palestine.

"Mercy for the soul of our martyrs heroes, freedom for our prisoners of occupation, and healing for all the wounded of freedom close to our homeland Palestine"

I am inspired by her talent and the many mediums she creates by. Including the beautiful textiles of her store Ak Tatreez and beautiful melody behind her song Melie Melie.'

Hala Alyan

a poet, professor, psychologist

“we owe Gaza endurance”

"why must palestinians audition for your empathy?"

“life in Gaza is precious”

She is calling to action, "one bold, simple ask", to remember the tangible humanity of Palestinian people. Through the dissonance, dissociation, disregard, that truth is not just a held opinion in the privacy of one's heart but pronounced again and again through every medium.

"I will make one bold simple ask, standing in front of you. We bear witness because this is how we build new narratives, because often this is the most beautiful task of an ally, which is to say of a human. To say, I see what you see. I see what you see."

[Reading for Meteor and their Meet the Moment series at the Brooklyn Museum]

Her thoughts on dehumanization are powerful and poetic. She invites investigation of our own complicity, makes clear where the vast gaps of empathy exist, and uses her art as a means to bridge our heart strings to the horror. Then, as we look, our limbs are motivated to act against it.

Listen to her NPR interview here.

This means speaking for Palestine. This means giving space for Palestine to speak. Raising their voices to the highest platforms. Feeding resources through the cracks of unjust barriers.

And Hala does this through beautiful collaborations. Some gifted, some co-created, all honoring truth.

Another incredible artist, Ana Raga, painted Hala, capturing the essence of "i see you" that is such a key message to Alyan's work. Every brush stroke is solidarity, every emotional nuance captured is honoring.

Hala collaborated with the amazing Adrienne Marie Brown on their podcast, How to Survive the End of the World. They shared wisdom on how to ground ourselves in this moment and endure long struggle and solidarity work.

You can listen to that here.

. . .

Creativity has the power to sustain and anchor people even amidst death and rubble. The creation of art tenderly holds trauma and carves a path for its healing. As I have learned about more artists in Palestine and in the diaspora, I am in awe of the ways they tell their stories, tenderly holding their trauma through brushstrokes and carving paths for healing through song.

How does a vagus nerve find peace against bombs and the hum of drones? How does a body look upon a landscape no longer recognizable and say I am still home? The art fills your bones. Makes them stronger, joy in the marrow, it does not seep even from amputations. These artists bear witness and create to cope and teach and sustain.

Thank you, Abed and Hala and everyone behind Khrarif.

Thank you, Aya.

Thank you, Yazana.

Thank you, Hala Alyan.