Biography
Sliman Mansour is one of the most distinguished Palestinian artists working today. Throughout his career, Mansour has established himself as an internationally recognised artist dedicated to giving visual expression to Palestinian identity.
Born in 1947 in Birzeit, a Palestinian town north of Ramallah, Mansour studied fine arts at Bezalel Art Academy in Jerusalem. Since the seventies, he has contributed to the development of an iconography of the Palestinian struggle through his works on paper. Uniting Mansour's body of work is the depiction of the orange tree (considered to symbolise the 1948 Nakba), the olive tree (considered to symbolise the 1967 war), traditional Palestinian embroidery, village life, and the figure of the Palestinian woman as the maternal symbol of Palestine, giving birth to and protecting the Palestinian people. One of Mansour's most recognised works is the 1974 painting, Camel of Hardship, of which there are three versions. In this image, the figure of the porter bends under the weight of his satchel, which is significantly shaped like an eye and holds the city of Jerusalem as identified by the Dome of the Rock. Personifying Palestine through the figure of an old, weary, and isolated man, Mansour captures the concept of sumud, or steadfastness, and the continuing endurance of the struggle despite hardship. Before its international acclaim, the piece resonated locally as it was printed as posters in 1975 and displayed in homes and public venues throughout the West Bank and Gaza.
In 1987, Mansour, together with artists Vera Tamari (1945), Tayseer Barakat (1959–), and Nabil Anani (1943–), founded the collective New Visions, as they called themselves in English. Based in the West Bank and Jerusalem, where the artists lived and worked, the collective sought to embrace a spirit of creative experimentation in their art making practices and move away from politically loaded symbolism dominant in Palestinian art at the time. Parallel to the collective’s formation was the first intifada (1987–1993). A non-violent populist movement of civil disobedience, the intifada sought to undercut Israeli military and economic authority through a collective boycott and the creation of self-sustaining Palestinian communities. To participate and support the intifada, the four artists of New Visions refused to work with art supplied imported into the territories through Israel and instead turned towards local, natural materials such as tea, coffee, leather, found pottery shards, henna, and clay.
Since then, Mansour has become acclaimed for a unique body of work that uses mud as a medium. Layering and molding mud into figural compositions on a wooden framework, Mansour deploys the actual land to depict Palestine, its history, and people. Working in a variety of sizes—some pieces are life-size—the artist creates what critics have termed "emblems of decay," as the cracks and distortions of the drying process suggest the passage of time and the impermanence of materiality. In one of his most important series from 1996 entitled I am Ismail, the artist molds a relief of the biblical figure into what appears as an ancient tombstone. Commemorating Ismail's story of exile and his relation to the land, Mansour suggests through the title his own autobiographical connection to the story of Ismail. The series documents the artist's continued dedication to a set of aesthetic concerns intimately related to the visualisation of the Palestinian struggle in all its hardships and aspirations.
Mansour has contributed extensively to the development of an infrastructure for the fine arts in the West Bank. He was the head of the League of Palestinian Artists from 1986 to 1990. In 1994, Mansour co-founded with his colleagues from New Visions, al-Wasiti Art Center in East Jerusalem and served as director from 1995 to 1996. He is a member of the Founding Board of Directors of the International Academy of Art Palestine, established in 2004 in Ramallah. He has taught at numerous cultural institutions and universities throughout the West Bank, including Al-Quds University. Also a professional cartoonist, Mansour published from 1981 to 1993 in Al-Fajr , a Palestinian English weekly published in Jerusalem between 1972 and 1993. He is the co-author of the 1997 publication, Both Sides of Peace: Israeli and Palestinian Political Poster Art.
