Depletion

Zawyeh Gallery presents "Depletion" (استنزاف), a solo exhibition by the Palestinian artist Alaziz Atef, at its Ramallah gallery from 17 October to 1 December 2026. It brings together 78 works, all made in 2026, in gauze bandage and paper, alongside installation works. In the work the gallery has released, layered and crumpled gauze forms both the ground and a pale figure that emerges from it.

The gallery frames the show around the body, pain and memory. It describes the works as a reading of thousands of images and testimonies of injury from what it calls the genocide in Gaza. In its account, the walls hold the works as they would hold emergency aid kits, and the artist is a wounded surgeon rather than a doctor on duty.

The open weave of the cloth is treated as a kind of archive. It soaks up pigment and thick ointment, letting some layers show and covering others. The gallery links the sheer amount of gauze in the exhibition to a double exhaustion, of the artist and of his supplies, which gives the show its title. In the detail released by the gallery, a faceless figure in white gauze rises from a crumpled ground of ochre, grey and black, broken by patches of rust orange. Seen whole in the online viewing room, the same work ends in loose strips of gauze hanging below its lower edge. The poet Ali Abu Ajamiyeh writes that the works call up victims without naming them, and connects their raw material to Walter Benjamin's idea of the trace.

Atef comes from Al-Arroub Refugee Camp, where he was born in 1996, and he lives and works in Ramallah. His bachelor's degree, from Birzeit University, is in political science and international relations. He is completing a graduate project in critical studies in its philosophy department, on what art does in war. His first exhibition, "Room 14", was held in September 2022 at the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre, Ramallah. It showed calligraphic drawings he had made while held in Ofer Prison and had smuggled out. These prison works were shown again in London in 2025, in "Room 14: Artworks from the Palestinian Prisoners' Movement". "Depletion" is at 7A President Circle, Al-Balo', Ramallah, open Saturday to Thursday, 10am to 6pm.