1030 +

Zawyeh Gallery in Ramallah is presenting 1030 +, a solo exhibition by Palestinian artist Khaled Hourani, who is based in Ramallah, on view from 1 August to 1 October 2026 at the gallery's space on President Circle in Al-Balo'. The title refers to the number of days that had passed since the war on Gaza began.

Hourani works from photographs taken in Gaza, but strips away almost everything around his subjects so that only people remain: figures carrying provisions, parents holding their children, displaced men, women and children who seem to float weightlessly among clouds. Some works also draw on the familiar visual language of the UN refugee agency, touching on the targeting of institutions and the disruption of food supplies.

"These works are not about war or life as events, but about humans after the events have faded, if they do at all," Hourani writes in his statement for the exhibition.

In the text accompanying the show, Rana Anani observes that the grey smoke so familiar from images of Gaza is absent here, replaced by calm and stillness. "Hourani offers us a space to dream in times of suffocation," she writes, describing the paintings as "an alternative sky to take shelter in until the war ends."

Seeing this work in Ramallah gives it particular resonance. Hourani, who initiated the celebrated Picasso in Palestine project in 2011 and has shown at dOCUMENTA (13) and the Sharjah Biennial, returns to Zawyeh, which hosted his solo exhibition Dispersed Crowds in 2019.