Refined Compositions: Ruba Salameh

How does one make art in the face of genocide?

There is no singular nor simple answer to this question, as we are not speaking of a closed chapter but of a catastrophe unfolding in real-time.

Witnessing a genocide induces a state of panic and relentless horror, leading to devastation and despair. Palestinian artist Ruba Salameh finds her way forward through abstract painting, weaving her own narrative while connecting across generations to art historian and artist Kamal Boullata’s work. Seeking filiation and meaning amid a lingering sense of loss and powerlessness, Salameh finds a transformative moment in Boullata’s Homage to the Flag (1995), whose legacy continues to echo and resonate through successive generations.

This exhibition reflects primarily on the persistence of certain symbols, such as the Palestinian flag, in the work of Palestinian artists. Reducing the colour palette as a gesture encouraged Salameh to revisit an act similar to that of other Palestinian artists before her, as an act of reclamation. It revealed how, even with the passing of time, these visual elements have remained charged with urgency and continue to inhabit the thoughts and practices of Palestinian artists.

The works focus less on reimagining flags as objects and more on tracing the emotional afterlife of their colours and how they manifest and shape a collective identity. Salameh’s choice of chromatic reduction in many of the paintings draws a powerful connection to a long lineage of Palestinian artists for whom the flag has symbolised both hope and censorship. Historically banned or suppressed, the flag’s palette has long stood in defiance of repression and silencing. Here, abstraction and reduction serve as a constraint that holds open a space for both grief and dissent. Many of the works in the exhibition were set aside for months, even years, then revisited and layered repeatedly until they arrived at their final form.

In reading the introduction to GEOMETRY OF LIGHT, a 2021 retrospective of Boullata’s work in Berlin, where Salameh currently lives and works, the etymology of the word “abstraction” takes on added resonance. Derived from the Latin abstractus, meaning “to pull away” or distance from the object, abstraction becomes a space rooted in memory—a way to navigate and reconstruct what has forcibly been erased. Salameh’s works echo this sensibility, collapsing inward through layers of paint, concealment and erasure, mimicking the processes of fossilisation and decay, reflecting on land, memory and belonging.

Boullata’s spectral presence offered Salameh a sense of spiritual guidance, filling her lingering quest to understand her own practice at a time of grief and collapse, not in isolation, but as part of a larger continuum shaped by accumulation and the cultural heritage of earlier Palestinian generations.

Building on these influences, Salameh’s signature motif—ants—appears throughout this body of work. Barely visible from a distance, these subterranean creatures emerge as faint marks: like dust, ash or early mould. They crawl across the surface, gather along hard edges and translucent borders, or drift alone in open space. Like the compositions themselves, their presence is layered and shifting, evoking contamination and invasion, yet also persistence and rootedness. Scattered and fragile, but intrinsic to the land, they recall the workers who build and the farmers who tend the soil – lives shaped and shattered under the weight of occupation. In contrast to the paintings’ strict lines, the ants embody an unruly, communal life that endures. In a world where death has become banal, they quietly insist on the everyday dignity of survival.