LUMIAR CITÉ

Jawad Al Malhi
WA BA3DEN
18.01 – 13.04.2025

18.01 | 16h Opening of the exhibition

17h Guided visit with Jawad Al Malhi and Tina Sherwell

Jawad Al Malhi, untitled, 2018-2023, courtesy of the artist.

The Maumaus residency programme presents the Palestinian artist Jawad Al Mahli at Lumiar Cité. ‘Wa Ba3den’, Al Mahli'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 Alta de Lisboa, 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 show’s Arabic title, ‘Wa Ba3den’, has multiple meanings. On the one hand, the phrase can be translated as ‘afterwards’, but in vernacular speech Wa Ba3den can also be translated as an exclamation similar to ‘oh, that again’, uttered when recurring misfortunes occur.
Al Mahli'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. The individuals and groups appear timeless, peaceful, sometimes fatalistic, lost somewhere between events that have happened and events that are yet to happen echoing the different possible meanings of wa ba3den.
Undoubtedly referring to a here and now in the Middle East, Al Malhi's ‘silent’ paintings are based on the artist’s observation of recurring fleeting moments of everyday life, which in turn are derived from an unrepresented epic history. Al Mahli engages with known histories and at the same time emancipates his paintings through his fragmentary approach.