Flower on a TV Screen
Mixed-media, prayer beads made of barbed wire, olive pits and rope, 25 cm x 18 cm x 2 cm (10 in x 7 in x 1 po), 2024
When Barakat spotted Zoo Garden—Cairo among the titles of Maroun Tomb’s lost works, she was reminded of her favorite photograph of her father, Fayez Barakat. The black-and-white photo was taken in 1964 when he was a young teenager visiting the Cairo Zoo. It had been 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. Her 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.
Though photographs capture fragments of time, they hint at irretrievable moments that ache of distance, the fragility of cultural inheritance, and the intimate stories passed down between generations. This painting invokes Barakat’s father’s personal history and engages with the memory, identity, and the losses that live between images and words.
Khaled Jarrar is an artist who has lived multiple lives. He studied interior design, worked as a clandestine carpenter in Nazareth and enlisted in intensive military training to end up as Yasser Arafat’s personal bodyguard for 25 years. He made the shift from the military to the arts by entering the field of photography and eventually getting his MFA at the University of Arizona. Jarrar works in a diverse range of mediums to explore and alternate perspectives surrounding identity, disappearance, and memory, unpacking their narrative limitations. His work addresses global issues in symbolic and transmutational ways through performance, film, installation, photography and sculpture.