Jawad Al Mahli

Wa Ba3den, Al Malhi’s first exhibition in Portugal, is based on a selection of paintings from a series with the same name, created in Ramallah between 2018 and 2023. For the neighbourhood in which the gallery is located, the artist has selected works of a thematic density that also suggest associations with the gallery’s urban context. The possibility of viewing the exhibition from the street through the gallery’s glass façade was an important starting point for the conception of the exhibition.

The Arabic title Wa Ba3den has different meanings. On the one hand, the phrase can be translated as “afterwards”, but in vernacular speech it can also be translated as an exclamation similar to “oh, that again”, uttered when recurring misfortunes occur. Al Malhi’s subjects in this series are mainly young men, whose gestures seem at once familiar and alien, ghostly, shadowless, and in their fragmentary state detached from a world that the painter withholds from us, confronting the viewer with a strange tension.

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