BUY ART TO SUPPORT GAZAN ARTISTS AND SHABABEEK ART CENTRE
Our sister organization in Gaza, Shababeek for Contemporary Art, has nurtured art production in the Palestinian territory since 2009. Today, physically, the center is under attack, and artists are displaced and on the move.
Encouraged by the artists themselves as a form of direct support, Fotogalleriet is facilitating the sales of artworks by Gazan artists whose profits will go to the organisation and its artists. The sales are initiated and organised in dialogue with Gazan artistic colleagues and currently exhibiting artist Ayman Alazraq.
All prints will be sold for a fixed price and can be picked up from Fotogalleriet’s offices in Oslo or shipped nationally and internationally. The prints are sold without frames, and shipping costs will vary.
Each print costs 1500 NOK (Norwegian kroner).
Detailed information about the prints and how to purchase them is available below.
Send an e-mail to post@fotogalleriet.no with the subject line ‘Shababeek Support Sales‘.
Include the full title of the work you wish to purchase, and amount of copies, if more than 1.
Include your full name, e-mail, contact number, and information on how to process your payment. As a public institution Fotogalleriet needs to have a record of all transactions and prefer invoices.
We also accept donations without the purchase of artists’ works, all of which go to Shabebeek for Contemporary Art.
Donations can be transferred domestically using Vipps to #89408 (Fotogalleriet) and international transfers via Paypal to PayPal.Me/FotogallerietOslo. Please mark your donation ‘Shababeek’
Maybe There Is a Way Out
Hamada Elkept, 2022
Dimensions: 42x30cm
About the work
In a small, narrow geographical place, we are still looking for our basic human needs, including freedom of movement and travel. People and societies naturally practice this acquired right, but we in Gaza, the largest open-air prison, are surrounded by concrete walls, let alone the buzzing of warplanes. This right then becomes impossible. To live in a politically and economically devasted war-torn zone makes the issue of traveling outside Palestine or moving between Palestinian cities an inconceivable step.
In this project, Elkept worked on expressing this right by using interactive visual language with the audience, a more practical tool for conveying the difficulty of movement and a sense of imbalance. He reflected this through a large-sized shoe that Elkept made, characterized by a heavy iron sole where your feet become heavy as if tied to the ground.
About the artist
Hamada Elkept was born in 1994 and received his BA in Fine Arts at Al-Aqsa University, Gaza. He partook in many workshops in contemporary art, such as video art, photo art, performance art, installation art, and graphic printing art, along with other community art activities and initiatives. He obtained an artistic residency in 2019 at Shababeek for Contemporary Art. His first solo exhibition, “The Empty Pot,” was held at the Institut Français de Gaza. Hamada also participated in the Contemporary Arts Workshop with the Spanish artist Nicolas Comparo in 2019/2022 and made it to the Italian-Palestinian Art Discussion Circles by the Tamer Foundation for Community Education, the outcome of which was the “In the Deep” exhibition in 2021.
Natural Scene
Fatma Hassouna, 2022
Dimensions: 42x30cm
About the work
Hassouna’s project tells the city’s story, the interactions between people, the random contradictions between hope, waiting, anticipation, searching, silliness, and many other feelings that cannot be framed in words. Her aim with this project is to draw attention to what may be viewed as standard in the eyes of the beholder, but in the vision of the image maker, it is not. She believes that details make our identity and that a deep look can tell much more than a shallow lock can do.
About the artist
Born in 2000, Fatma Hassouna is a multimedia graduate from the University College of Applied Sciences in Gaza. She works as a freelance writer and photographer. She identifies as the daughter of life and experience. She is passionate about discovering the uniqueness of the simplest details.
Shooting Area 365
Mahmoud Al-Hajj, 2022
Dimensions: 30x21cm
About the work
This series of photographic installations falls within the “Victim Creation Technology” project, which comprises a series of episodes, each one discussing a different context of violence and re-enacting the continuous accumulation of memory of violence since 1987 through the deconstruction and reconstruction of specific parts of the Israeli army’s archive of violence against armless Palestinian civilians.
Unlike reality, images in this archive may appear less violent and darker, allowing viewers to absorb the material better. It provided the impetus to develop a non-linear narrative that translates the artist’s sense of the past and shows the distorted reflections of his identity, shaped by living for decades under multiple generations of victims creation technology, through the process of recycling images to make them so bitter and incomprehensible, similar to a cement block in the middle of the road preventing generations from moving forward.
This series simulates the invisible similarity between the Gaza Strip and Masafer Yatta, represented by how the military ruler uses both. Dense with cubes, concrete poles, and warning signs, Masafer Yatta is a training area for soldiers known as “Shooting Area 918.” On the other side, Gaza is shown as a more complex target area where the pilots are professionally trained to destroy buildings based on engineering specifications to ensure that they are entirely or partially bombarded as per the instructions.
About the artist
Mahmoud Al-Hajj, a visual artist and art teacher, was born in 1990. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Journalism and Mass Communication. In 2021, Al-Hajj completed two artistic residencies at the Royal Spanish Academy, Rome, and the Royal Academy of Arts, The Hague. He held a solo exhibition,402 of Ramadi, at the Shababek Center for Contemporary Art in Gaza. He produced six projects utilizing photography, digital art, and video, exhibited in Palestine, Europe, and the USA. In 2022, his experimental short film The Right to See was shown at the Les Instants Video in Marseille. The film was also shown at the Cairo Video Festival in 2021 in conjunction with a duet exhibition by Rob Voerman under the same name at Plaatsmaken Studio in the Netherlands.
The Mulberry Seller
Shareef Sarhan, 2016
Dimensions: 30x30cm
About the artist
Shareef Sarhan was born in Gaza in 1976 and is a visual artist and photographer. He is a founding member of the collective Shababeek for Contemporary Art and a member of the Association of Palestinian Artists. Sarhan received his diploma in Arts from the University of ICS in the United States. He participated in Darat Al Funun Academy in Jordan under the supervision of the artist Marwan Kassab Bachi. He received the Bronze Award from the Festival of Arab Photographers in 2008 and the Recognition Award in 2007. Sarhan produced the photobook “Gaza Live” in 2012. His work was exhibited in 2022 in Berlin, Gaza, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Amman, Britain, and the United States.
Fishermen
Shareef Sarhan, 2016
Dimensions: 30x30cm
About the artist
Shareef Sarhan was born in Gaza in 1976 and is a visual artist and photographer. He is a founding member of the collective Shababeek for Contemporary Art and a member of the Association of Palestinian Artists. Sarhan received his diploma in Arts from the University of ICS in the United States. He participated in Darat Al Funun Academy in Jordan under the supervision of the artist Marwan Kassab Bachi. He received the Bronze Award from the Festival of Arab Photographers in 2008 and the Recognition Award in 2007. Sarhan produced the photobook “Gaza Live” in 2012. His work was exhibited in 2022 in Berlin, Gaza, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Amman, Britain, and the United States.
