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Dreams in Black and White

Mohammed Joha

3/06/1122/06/11


Tuesday to Saturday, 11am – 6pm, FREE

Dreams in Black and White is the first UK solo show from Palestinian artist Mohammed Joha. This exhibition features a series of paintings, land art photographs and an installation by the artist. Using images of canvas dolls, often tangled with strings, with material covering their eyes and mouths he explores the predicament of children in Palestine today.

Joha comments: “Many children today in Palestine have no freedom, no rights. Many cannot learn or play, nor discover their talents. Nor dream freely in fact!

In Jerusalem alone, there are more than 1,000 children in Israeli prisons. But what can they say or do to rebel or defend their rights? They are hostage to two forces that crush them: the Occupation, war and oppression on the one hand and, on the other, a hopeless sense of acceptance of their condition.

For me, they seem like straw and canvas dolls – easy to abuse, manipulate and throw around; overwhelmed by bigger hands that transform their joy to sorrow and tragedy. In Gaza, where I come from, they are used as human shields, but their minds are also manipulated and invaded by adult ideas and ideologies, which are often violent and selfish.

In my project, the strings which manipulate the dolls/the children are the same strings that paralyse and choke them to death.”

Mohammed Joha was born in Gaza, Palestine in 1978. He was the winner of the first prize at the Qattan Foundation’s Young Artist of the Year Award 2004, and has exhibited in group and solo shows in Palestine, France and Italy where he currently lives.

Exhibition brochure

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