Survivals by Tayseer Barakat

Tayseer Barakat’s Survivals brings together his most recent work, an extraordinary series of paintings produced over the course of two years. Steeped both in the long history of Arab visual art and mythology, and in contemporary aesthetics of political struggle, the collection is a stunning exploration of anger, pain and endurance.

This limited edition print is a representation of his paintings of which they recall the ancient art and cave drawings from which Barakat pulls inspiration, but layered onto each canvas to produce an uncertain depth. Sometimes immersed or obscured by their surroundings, sometimes emerging starkly from them, the figures are buffeted by swirling colors and patterns that repeat insistently across the series. Recurring motifs – walls against which figures are frozen, the bird that perches but is never in flight – further bind a collection of paintings which, though different, share a simultaneous sense of poised immobility and furious struggle.

Barakat surely does more than simply acknowledge a philosophical inspiration. His collection plays with references ancient and modern. But it does not produce a smooth synthesis of styles. Rather, it performs their sometimes difficult interactions, articulating the contested nature of Palestine’s place among the global struggles and suffering of the twenty-first century, and the ways this may be navigated, or not, by language and by art.