LAILA SHAWA

Shawa’s formal art education was at the Leonardo da Vinci School, Cairo and the University of Rome’s Academy of Fine Arts. She also attended the School of Seeing in Salzburg, established by Austrian artist Oskar Kokoschka. In 1964, back in Gaza, she supervised arts and crafts education for UNWRA while working with the documentary photographer Hrant Nakashian. She co-founded the Rashad Shawa Cultural Centre. As an artist, Shawa’s concern is to reflect the political realities of her country, becoming, in the process, a chronicler of events. Her work is based on a heightened sense of realism and targets injustice and persecution wherever their roots may be. The initial impetus for a piece often comes from her photographs, which are later transformed by means of silkscreen printing techniques. The written word is often present in her work, as in the acclaimed Walls of Gaza series (1994), which focussed on the heart-rending messages of hope and resistance spray-painted, by the ordinary people of Gaza upon the walls of their city.

In 1994, October Gallery first showed Shawa in the exhibition Shawa and Wijdan, a critical exhibition which presented works by both artists. Her 2012 solo exhibition at the gallery, The Other Side of Paradise, showed sculptures and paintings that continued her uncompromising documentation of events in today’s Middle East. She is represented in public and private collections across the world, including the National Galleries of Jordan and Malaysia; the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK; the British Museum, London, UK; and the National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., USA.