Haifa, what a burn left behind?

Acrylic, oil and mixed media on canvas, 2025

This painting presents a world where too much intimacy clashes with too much brutality. The burned plants symbolizes the functions of intimacy around Abu Hawash, how it adapts, survives, or withers in different conditions and is sometimes lost, like Maroun Tomb’s lost works. This work speaks to the struggle of navigating spaces where intimacy and violence coexist and are intertwined with movement and restriction. 

The central female figure, rendered in muted blues, purples, and grays, appears both grounded and dissolving into her surroundings, reflecting the fluidity of connection and the instability of relationships. The white space in the painting is symbolic of the emptiness the artist feels and the countless connections severed, the relationships, memories left behind. The stillness of this space makes tangible the absence of home and a family scattered by displacement. Through this work, Abu Hawash traces these lost connections, exploring how the voids we carry– particularly within Arab and Mediterranean cultures, shapes our collective existence and redefine our intimacy.

Aya Abu Hawash is a Palestinian multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, mixed media, and archival research. She holds an MFA from Université Libanaise – Institut des Beaux-Arts (2016) and is completing postgraduate studies at École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris. Her work explores how intimacy clashes with brutality, with figures and landscapes reflecting the fluidity of relationships and instability during crises. She questions how intimacy in Arab culture functions through hidden archives. Aya is currently a resident at Cité Internationale des Arts and is developing Archives of Desire during her 2025 residency at La Chartreuse, Avignon.