Abdul Hay Zarara, Majd Abdel Hamid and Oraib Toukan

Abdul Hay Mosallam Zarara

(1933, Al-Dawayima–2020, Amman)

Born in Al-Dawayima, his early life was rooted in rural traditions, which deeply informed his later artistic representations of village life, community customs, and oral history. The trauma of the Nakba and the 1948 al-Dawayima massacre, which displaced his family, shaped his lifelong commitment to preserving Palestinian culture through his artistic practice.

After relocating multiple times due to political upheavals, Zarara settled in Libya, where his artistic career began. Using an innovative technique of sawdust and glue to create painted reliefs, he developed a unique visual language centered on themes of resistance and identity. His work merged personal memory with national history, often featuring freedom fighters, revolutionary slogans, and symbolic landscapes.

In collaboration with artists like Mustafa Al Hallaj, Zarara played a key role in fostering Palestinian cultural institutions in exile, notably by co-directing the Naji Al Ali Fine Arts Gallery in Damascus.

His practice extended beyond Palestine, portraying global liberation movements in Ireland, Latin America, and South Africa. Over time, his art evolved technically and thematically, shifting from monochrome depictions to vibrant, dynamic compositions.

After moving to Amman in 1992, Zarara continued to produce politically and emotionally resonant work, especially highlighting the role of women in resistance.

Abdul Hay Mosallam Zarara is the only non-living artist featured in we refuse_d. His work is presented posthumously in homage to his legacy, his commitment to art and life, and serves as a powerful testament to resilience, memory, and the enduring struggle for justice.

Majd Abdel Hamid

Majd Abdel Hamid is a Palestinian visual artist based between Beirut and Paris.  Working across media, video, installation, drawing, sculpture, and especially embroidery, Abdel Hamid crafts a visual language that is at once meticulous and deeply intuitive. He uses textile-based processes as a form of meditative and political engagement-foregrounding slowness as a method of survival, reflection, and refusal.

His work explores the fragmented conditions of contemporary life under occupation, displacement, and systemic violence. Through repetitive gestures, abstract forms, and restrained palettes, Abdel Hamid transforms embroidery into a conceptual tool-at once intimate and archival. Many of his works bear the weight of personal and collective histories, marked by interruptions, absences, and wounds both literal and symbolic.

Abdel Hamid's practice resists spectacle, choosing instead to dwell in the quiet, the unfinished, and the fragile. Rather than offering resolution, his works hold space for ambiguity, mourning, and subtle acts of defiance. Through thread and time, Abdel Hamid weaves a language of care, resistance, and deep attention to the unseen.

Resonance presents a series of embroideries tracing the slow growth of a succulent plant observed over several months. Through the practice of embroidery and watching a plant grow on a daily basis, Abdel Hamid abstracts a set of motifs from lived experience. Known for their thick leaves and ability to thrive in arid conditions, succulents embody resilience, adaptability, and quiet intelligence. Their spiral formations optimise survival, maximising light and channeling moisture to the roots.

In these embroidered studies, the plant becomes a metaphor for persistence under pressure and for enduring in resource-scarce environments. With subtlety and care, Abdel Hamid draws parallels between natural survival strategies and the emotional and political landscapes of human life.

Oraib Toukan

Raised and shaped by the landscapes of Jordan and Palestine, Oraib Toukan’s essay films, photo assemblages, and texts delve into relationships between the tender and the horrific, materiality and loss, grief and meaning. While exploring the emancipatory potential of images, her gaze often wanders unexpectedly to natural phenomena; cacti, a horse's neck, or an eyelash.

In addition to her visual practice, Toukan is a writer and scholar pursuing a research-based practice in Berlin. Her writing draws from the rich lexicon of the Arabic language, challenging dominant narratives with more vernacular understandings of images at large, and images of struggle in particular. Her book Sundry Modernism investigates Palestinian modernism through an exploration of its cultural and political materials, expanding conversations around modernist practices beyond Eurocentric frameworks. Toukan has held academic positions at Bard College as well as the International Academy of Art, Palestine before completing her PhD at Oxford University in 2019. Her practice and research continue to contribute to critical discussions on art, language, politics and poetics.

Influenced by a dialogue over the years with the Palestinian pedagogue Munir Fasheh on turbeh (local soil in Arabic) and inspired by the Palestinian writer and lawyer Raja Shehadeh's writings on sarha (to wander freely with the terrain), Toukan crafts an intimate and uniquely haptic perspective on images from what she terms, their 'soil grain'- reading images as topographies, and topographies as images.

Things Bigger Than What Can Be Seen published by Archive Books as part of we refuse_d explores these symmetries and analogies and translates some of Toukan's essays on seeing into Arabic for the first time. A composition of photographs selected from the book are presented here, and imbued with notations titled Index (Living Things).