In The Story Portals, Palestinian artist Abdul Rahman Katanani presents a series of monumental weavings inspired by traditional Palestinian embroideries (Tatreez), formed from metal sheets and barbed wire. Katanani began these sculptural objects more than a year before the pivotal events of October 7 2023. When taken together, these intricate works trace a deep shift in the internal world of the artist that has closely mirrored external events in the region.
Hovering between industrial menace and quite formal painterly abstraction, yet these works hold a lightness of touch that is all Katanani. Become even a little familiar with his works and it will be clear that the lace-like grace that his work inhabits in the face of brutality, hardness, crunching machinery, is absolutely integral to his vision. However hard a material, the industrial origin, barbaric use, Katanani can take this hardness and gift it new life, his handwork holding up the material as simultaneously resolutely itself and as something quite new, incidentally or not, somehow opposite to its intended use, and more, as full of joy and life.
For the painters and poets, Laura J. Braverman, Amy Todman and Afaf Zurayk, of Faith in the Forming painting and poetry share an equal weight, though not a weight that can be measured on a scale. Rather the balance is one of knowing what is already there, what is coming from within. A word can be placed beside every painting, but this is hardly the point. Rather, for some, the painting or poem might arrive alongside its neighbour, might suggest itself perplexedly. Indeed, the relationship of the poem to the painting may be unclear, perhaps must remain a little unknown, because the painting and the word, though related, reach toward singular spaces, both of which continue to unfold alongside one another.
