The Artists
Sohail Salem
An artist and academic, Sohail was born in Gaza City to parents forcibly expelled from Bureir village in 1948. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Al-Aqsa University in 1999 and has since been actively enriching Gaza’s contemporary art scene through teaching at Al-Aqsa University, as well as co-founding the Gaza Contemporary Art collective Eltiqa and its gallery in 2002.
Sohail was forced to leave his home in the Al-Rimal neighborhood of Gaza one day after the genocide began. He first found refuge at his parents’ house in the Old City of Gaza. At the end of January 2024, he was detained for a day and released that evening with orders to walk south. With nothing but his ID, no money and not even a mobile phone, like thousands of others, he had to walk under the watch of Israeli tanks to Deir al-Balah, where he reunited with his family after an intense two-day search. They lived in a garage for a year. Since January 2025, Sohail and his family have been living in their partially damaged home in Gaza, where Sohail maintains his artistic practice with whatever materials available for him.
A Call for Help, ink on school notebook, 5.9” x 7.8”, 2024
A Call for Help, ink on graph paper, 11” x 15”, 2024
Sohail’s practice emerges from his lived experience in Gaza, exploring the relationship between the individual, place, memory, and survival. His series A Call for Help explores the psychological and emotional dimensions of living under conditions of political uncertainty, displacement, and prolonged war. It transforms modest everyday materials into an archive of personal and collective memory, evoking states of absence, waiting, and human vulnerability.
These drawings are not only records of events, but intimate acts of presence - a way of continuing artistic practice, preserving memory, and communicating with a world beyond Gaza. As Sohail reflects, “The life of a Gazan artist is not easy, as we are often isolated from the world. However, art serves as a bridge between us and other people… Through art, we tell the world that we are still alive.”
@sohail.salem