Written by Wafa Roz

Walid Abu Shakra was born in Umm El Fahem, Palestine, in 1946. He left school at the age of 16 to support his family, working several jobs in Jaffa and Hadera just to make ends meet. Shakra was among the first generation of Palestinians to study in Israeli schools; in 1967, he studied at the Avni Institute of Art and Design, in Tel Aviv, under Yaakov Wechsler, Moshe Propes, Avshalom Okashi, Yehezkel Streichman, and others. In 1974, he moved to London, where he studied etching at Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design.

Abu Shakra faced numerous obstacles as a Palestinian student in an Israeli institution. At the Avni Institute, as elsewhere in the colonial state, classes were held only in Hebrew, and the curriculum was concerned solely with a Western cultural and artistic heritage. Despite these obstacles, Abu Shakra worked to celebrate and preserve Palestinian visual traditions in his work. 

In light of the continuous expropriation of Palestinian land by the Israeli state, Abu Shakra built his artistic career around preserving this vanishing landscape in his monochromatic etchings and engravings. His works are intimate, some as small as an identity card, and feature details that connote his knowledge of and fondness for Palestine. The artist renders native flora with care and precision and titles his works with the Arabic place-names that the Israeli occupation has violently supplanted with Hebrew ones. The intimate works invite equally intimate relationships with their viewers: one imagines that a native villager could carry in his pocket a tiny drawing like a talisman, a piece of his hometown that is nowhere to be found on an Israeli map. 

Abu Shakra’s works call attention to the erasure inherent in the Israeli colonial project, a goal apparent in his famous renderings of the cactus, or sabra. While the sabra was appropriated as an Israeli nationalist symbol after 1948, for Palestinians, it represented an eternal, resilient link to the land – and a stubborn refusal to leave it. Unlike his younger cousin Asim, Walid Abu Shakra did not depict the cactus as uprooted and contained in a flower pot, nor did he place it centrally in his works. Instead, the artist depicted the cacti in its native environment, where it had been used by Palestinian farmers for centuries to designate territorial boundaries. Though they appear to be straightforward landscapes, drawn from life, one wonders at the connotations of the sabra as a mark of land ownership. Perhaps this is another element of Abu Shakra’s quiet resistance to Israeli appropriation, staking a claim upon the sabra as upon the land it delineates.

In the mid-1980s, Abu Shakra’s artistic career was interrupted for nearly a quarter of a century when he devoted himself to Sufism and religious studies. In his 70s, he resumed working with prints and returned to his famed landscapes. The artist’s 2012 retrospective was held simultaneously at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and his brother Said’s gallery in Umm El Fahem, enabling audiences from both sides of the colonial divide to see his work.

The artist died in London, 2019.

Sources

Boullata, Kamal, and John Berger. Palestinian art 1850-2005. London: SAQI, 2009.

Villarreal, Ignacio. A gaze at the watchman's post: A selection of prints by Walid Abu Shakra at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Accessed October 17, 2017. http://artdaily.com/news/52922/A-gaze-at-the-watchman-s-post--A-selection-of-prints-by-Walid-Abu-Shakra-at-the-Tel-Aviv-Museum-of-Art#.WeWs0ccvJBw.

אזולאי, אליערמון. "מחסוםכיסופים: ראיוןעםהאמןהפלסטיניולידאבושקרה." הארץ. January 06, 2012. Accessed October 17, 2017. https://www.haaretz.co.il/gallery/art/1.1610233.

Azoulay, Ellie Armon. "A new retrospective shows how far Palestinian art has come." Haaretz.com. January 14, 2012. Accessed October 17, 2017. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/culture/a-new-retrospective-shows-how-far-palestinian-art-has-come-1.407309.