Paintings

Zoo Garden - Cairo

Acrylic on Canvas, 60 x 90 cm, 2025

Currently on view in The Lost Paintings exhibtion

When I spotted Zoo Garden—Cairo among the Lost Paintings titles list, I immediately thought of my favorite photograph of my father, Fayez Barakat. The black-and-white photo was taken in 1964 when he was a young teenager visiting the Zoo Garden in Cairo. This was his first trip out of Palestine and marked the beginning of his lifelong path as an antiquities and art dealer.

The image, though seemingly ordinary, carries immense weight. My father’s youthful gaze meets the camera, as if looking toward the future. The towering elephant becomes a symbol in the work representing the scale of memory and stories carried by the older generations of Palestinians, and of the tension between what is remembered, what is shared, and what is lost.

There is a bittersweetness in old black-and-white photographs. They capture fragments of time, yet they hint at entire worlds, some now irretrievable. My painting responds to that feeling: the ache of distance, the fragility of cultural inheritance, and the intimate, sometimes unreachable stories passed down between generations. In choosing Zoo Garden—Cairo, I am invoking my father’s personal history and engaging with a wider meditation on memory, identity, and the losses that live between images and words.

MOHAMMED THE MENACE

Acrylics on canvas, 102 cm x 104 cm, 2021

The conversation starts with me asking the question, “have you heard of Dennis the Menace?” I watch the smile grow as waves of nostalgia flood the brain with images of a troublemaking little white boy and his signature slingshot. Then I ask, “what about Mohammed the Menace?” The combination of these words triggers an instant sense of discomfort. Why is blonde-haired American Dennis not considered threatening, but Mohammed is? In front of you stands my son, Mohammed. He wields a slingshot like Dennis, but he is only a menace in the minds of those who have fallen victim to the propaganda that slipped discreetly into their subconscious via the language, imagery and misrepresentations in news, movies, books, education, social media and social conditioning. Instead of aiming a stone at the tanks and soldiers that brutally oppress and occupy his native land of Palestine, he aims the light of awareness at you. This awareness allows you to become aware of what ideas you allow to reside in your mind and their role in shaping your emotions, judgments, and stereotypes. Blinders are lifted, revealing the greed and violence of white settler colonialism, whose intent is to dehumanize Palestinians to justify the genocide, ethnic cleansing and usurpation of Palestinian land. This awareness will dismantle the imperialistic and colonial infrastructure of your mind to feel and know truth from a place of love.

MOTHER
Acrylic on canvas, 125 x 87 cm, 2020

Some of us fetishize the past; others feel entitled to manipulate it to stake a claim on land inhabited by its indigenous population. We cherish memories that aren’t our own from a time we never experienced. We feel connected to objects we use as evidence of our existence, an imagined past, the past of ancestors, a past that exists only in cultural remnants, stories, and artifacts that survived the constructs of time and nation. This figure of Asherah, the Canaanite mother goddess, serves as a reminder of the people and tribes of the Canaanites, Philistines, and Edomites, inhabitants of the land alongside the twelve tribes of Israel. Though historians and archaeologists may understand Asherah as representing the divine feminine or, according to the Biblical interpretation, an essential member of the Canaanite pantheon, there is no dispute over her creation from the earth of the land of her origin. This large painting of a small artifact holds in it the eternal longing of returning physically and spiritually to our mother, to the source from which we came.

HEART STRINGS

Acrylic, spray paint and cotton thread on canvas, 36 x 24 in / 91.5 x 61 cm, 2017

I paint myself in front of Jerusalem poppies, wearing the traditional white headscarf, cross-stitching a Palestinian embroidery motif straight onto my exposed skin. The embroidery is a way of reclaiming my cultural identity and voice as a Palestinian. Every stitch becomes a letter in an indigenous language that I am slowly becoming more and more fluent in, relieving the feeling of being a foreigner in my native land, skin and mind.

AMERICAN NAKBA

Spray paint and cotton thread on canvas, 30 x 40 in / 76 x 101 cm, 2017

Growing up in America as a Palestinian, spoonfed by a media and education that glorifies white settler national rhetoric, how many of us choose privilege and comfort over speaking up and taking action? Al Nakba, or the catastrophe, refers to the attacks, massacres, widespread destruction, loss, and forced expulsion of the Palestinian people in 1948 by Zionist terror militia groups in the creation of the ethnostate of Israel. There is a strange irony and hypocrisy living on and identifying with a land belonging to an indigenous people still being ethnically cleansed from their native land through a parallel system of white settler colonialism to Palestine.