Nabil Anani, The Land and I: when a boycott becomes a material palette

ALSERKAL AVENUE · DUBAI

Reading time: 8 min

Nabil Anani builds landscapes out of straw, seeds, dried herbs and spices. That material vocabulary is usually described as symbolic. Its origin is more concrete than that: in the late 1980s he and three colleagues stopped buying imported art supplies, and everything about how the work looks follows from what was available instead.

---

The Land and I, at Zawyeh Gallery on Alserkal Avenue from 29 September 2024 to 26 January 2025, gathered two decades of landscape work by the Palestinian artist Nabil Anani.

The subject is the terraced hills, olive groves and rural settlements of Palestine, painted as continuous, inhabited and unbroken. The gallery framed the work as a refusal of colonial erasure, and Anani has spoken about the land as an active participant rather than a backdrop. Every notice of the show took that framing, and it is the artist’s own.

What most of them passed over is the surface. These are not paintings in the ordinary sense. Wood, straw, dried herbs, seeds, quinoa and spices are worked into the canvases, so the hillside is made partly of the things that grow on it. That is usually described as symbolic, and it is, but the reason it exists is not symbolic at all. It is a procurement decision taken nearly forty years ago, and it is one of the most consequential design decisions in modern Arab art.

A boycott is a procurement decision, and procurement decides form

During the First Intifada, Anani, Sliman Mansour, Vera Tamari and Tayseer Barakat formed the group New Visions and stopped buying Israeli-manufactured art materials. Mansour’s account of the reasoning is unadorned: people were planting vegetables in their gardens so as not to buy anything from Israel, so why should artists not do the same.

Stated like that it sounds like a gesture. In practice it is a supply chain problem, and anyone who has ever had a specified material withdrawn mid-project knows what happens next.

Take away commercial oil paint, stretched cotton duck, manufactured pigment and industrial binder, and you have removed a set of properties, not just a set of products. Oil on canvas gives you a flexible ground of consistent size, a glaze that can be built in transparent layers, a colour range that is stable and repeatable, and a drying time you can plan around. Nothing locally abundant in the West Bank does any of that.

What was available was clay, wood, straw, mud, leather, animal glue, and dyes made from coffee, tea, henna, olive oil and spices. Each of the four artists took a different substitution. Mansour and Tamari went to potter’s clay. Barakat went to pyrography, burning into wood. Anani went to leather, wrapped and worked with natural dyes.

Now look at what leather forces. It comes in hides, so the piece size is limited by the animal. It has a grain and a nap. It takes dye unevenly and irreversibly, because there is no wiping back. It stretches more in one direction than the other. It will not hold a thin transparent glaze, so tone has to be built by juxtaposition and by inlay rather than by layering. The result is inevitably flatter, more assembled, more tonal, more about edge and surface than about depth.

Which is precisely what that generation of Palestinian painting looks like. The visual language did not arrive from a manifesto. It arrived from a materials list, and the manifesto came with it.

That is worth stating plainly on a design site, because it is the clearest available demonstration of something designers know and rarely get to prove: you cannot change a material without changing a form. The New Visions artists ran that experiment under real conditions and the results are still visible in Anani’s canvases four decades later, long after the immediate reason for the substitution had passed.

The terraces are the design object

The recurring subject in this body of work is the terraced hillside, and it is worth being clear about what a terrace actually is, because it is not scenery.

A Palestinian hill terrace is a dry stone retaining structure. Stones cleared from the slope are stacked without mortar into a wall that holds a level bed of soil behind it, and the sequence of walls turns an unfarmable gradient into a series of cultivable steps. The dry stone construction is not a limitation, it is the specification: an unmortared wall drains, so winter rain passes through rather than building pressure behind it, and it can be repaired one stone at a time by one person without materials or plant.

That is a piece of vernacular engineering refined over thousands of years, and it is recognised as such. The terraced landscape at Battir, south of Jerusalem, with its ancient irrigation system, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2014 as a cultural landscape.

So when Anani paints a hillside of stepped fields and olive trees, he is not painting nature. He is painting an infrastructure: a designed, built, maintained system whose form is entirely determined by water, gradient and the size of a stone a person can lift. The olive trees on it are part of the same system, since their roots hold the beds the walls retain.

Read that way the work sits alongside the other vernacular building systems this site has covered rather than in a separate category of landscape painting. A terrace, a wind tower and a palm frond roof are the same kind of object: a solution developed slowly under a specific climate, using only what is locally to hand, buildable and repairable by the people who live in it.

What he leaves out is composition

The gallery notes that these landscapes contain no checkpoints and no barriers, and that is usually read as aspiration. It is also a formal decision, and formal decisions are where a landscape painter actually works.

Omission is composition. A wall crossing a hillside is a strong horizontal that would cut every one of these pictures in half and would immediately become the subject, because a hard engineered line always dominates an organic one. Removing it is not only a political statement about a desired future; it is the only way to keep the terraces legible as a continuous system, which is the thing the paintings are actually describing.

The two motives reinforce each other rather than competing, and that is what makes the choice more interesting than a simple refusal. A landscape that is continuous is a landscape you can read the logic of. Interrupt it and you can no longer see how the water moves, where the beds step, how one hillside relates to the next. The unbroken view is not nostalgia. It is the only view from which the system makes sense.

The materials are not archival, and that is the argument

There is a technical dimension to this work that nobody writing about it mentions, and it deserves saying because it goes to the heart of the method.

Quinoa, seeds, dried herbs and spices are organic. They are not stable in the way a manufactured pigment is stable. Organic colourants fade, plant material becomes brittle, oils in seeds can migrate and stain, and anything edible on a surface is a potential food source for pests. A conservator looking at these canvases sees a set of long-term risks that a tube of cadmium red does not present.

Anani knows what he is using. And on a body of work whose subject is a landscape under erasure, a material that changes over time is arguably the more honest one. Manufactured pigment is engineered to resist time. Straw is not, and neither is a terrace wall left unrepaired, and neither is a grove nobody is allowed to reach.

That coherence is worth stating plainly for a collector or an institution, because it comes with a practical brief attached. The material choice fits the argument exactly, and the works repay the more careful environmental control that organic material deserves. Both things follow from the same decision.

The gallery that carries it

Zawyeh Gallery was founded in Ramallah in 2013 by Ziad Anani, to show Palestinian artists and get their work seen internationally. It opened a second space in Dubai, on Alserkal Avenue, in 2020, and it shows at Art Dubai, the Beirut Art Fair and fairs in Turkey and Europe. Its roster includes Sliman Mansour, Samir Salameh and Malak Mattar.

The structure is worth noting for what it solves. A gallery based only in Ramallah faces movement restrictions, shipping difficulties and an international audience that mostly cannot travel to it. A gallery based only in Dubai would be showing Palestinian art at a remove from where it is made. Running both means the work is made in one place and reaches the market from another, with the same people responsible for both ends.

That is a logistical answer to a political condition, and it is the same category of decision as the one New Visions took in the 1980s: when the normal route is closed, redesign the route. Four decades separate the two, and the instinct is identical.

Where it holds

Two points, offered carefully, because this is work made under conditions that make ordinary description feel small.

The first is about the strength of a signature. Anani is eighty one, has been working this material vocabulary since the late 1980s, and this exhibition spans two decades of one subject. Consistency at that length is a genuine achievement, because a material language that began as an urgent improvisation has been carried forward and refined until it is recognisable on sight. The canvases here are at their most compelling where the physical material genuinely disrupts the picture surface, and the straw and seed keep asserting themselves as substance long after the view has been taken in.

The second concerns what the work offers its audience. These landscapes reward a viewer who can read a terrace, recognise an olive grove of a certain age, and understand what is missing from the composition. To a viewer without that, they are attractive rural scenes in warm colours, which is a generous place to begin. Anani has never pretended otherwise, and the work is not built for foreign explanation. It gives back whatever a viewer brings to it, and it keeps giving.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

The straightforward version of this exhibition is a great Palestinian artist painting his homeland with materials taken from it, and that version is true and does not need improving.

The version a design publication can add is about where the method came from. Four artists, faced with a political reason not to buy something, worked out what they could make instead. What they found was clay, straw, mud, leather and the dye you can get from coffee and henna and spice. Those materials would not do what the imported ones did, so the work changed shape to suit them, and the shape it changed into became the visual language of a generation.

Designers spend a great deal of time arguing that constraint produces form. This is one of the clearest demonstrations available of it happening, under conditions nobody would have chosen, and still legible in the surface of a canvas made four decades later.