Loss Marginalia

Loss Marginalia, curated by Amin Alsaden, brings together Arab artists who hold space for grief. The group exhibition opened at the A.M. Qattan Foundation's cultural centre in Ramallah on 16 May 2026 and runs until 28 January 2027, gathering sculpture, embroidery, photography, video, drawing and sound by twenty artists from across the region and its diasporas.

Alsaden frames grief as a method rather than a subject, and draws on the classical Arabic elegy. The works, in the words of the exhibition text, act as "poetic marginalia scribbled around a gaping void, the losses that can never be recovered". Expressing sorrow, the exhibition proposes, is neither surrender nor retreat: in the curator's words, "mourning is our right now, an ongoing act of resistance against erasure."

On the centre's terrace, Algerian artist Rachid Koraïchi has arranged stones gathered from Bisan, Tiberias, Jericho and Birzeit into interlocking waves around a central star inscribed with Arabic letters, an homage to Palestine and to the poet Mahmoud Darwish. Palestinian artist Reem Masri has hand-embroidered an elegy, a personal poem, onto a dress inspired by a mourning veil, while Lebanese artist Nadim Choufi assembles an auto-obituary from the verses of Palestinian poet Ali Foda, arranged to suggest the Arabic word for 'no'.

Five artists based in Gaza, Kholoud Hammad, Osama Hussain, Rawan Murad, Shereen Abedalkareem Hasanin and Sohail Salem, contribute hand sketches made between 2023 and 2025, reproduced as postcards so they can circulate far beyond the gallery. They are shown alongside works by Vera Tamari, Tarik Kiswanson, Ismaïl Bahri, Hussein Nassereddine, and Joe Namy with Maya Al Khaldi, among others.

Seen in Ramallah, the exhibition carries particular weight: a regional gathering of artists making room for collective mourning, in a building designed as a public home for Palestinian culture.