By: Rebeca Ventura
Palestinian artist Hannah Atallah and Salvadoran artist Rafael Rodriguez beautifully explore what it means to be separated from their homeland through their joint exhibition, "Whispers of a Distant Land." These 24 carefully curated art pieces take you through an emotional journey of being unable to visit a home you long for. The theme of forced displacement and migration permeates the entire collection.
Their art highlights the stories that often get overlooked, especially in the current political climate. Rodriguez explains, “I'm trying to create work to highlight those small things that give people humanity because that's what the system is trying to do with us—dehumanize us just because of the color of our skin.”
Both artists strikingly weave cultural and personal symbols into their artworks, making them cohesive and unique to their own personal styles. One pattern recognizable in Atallah’s work are the tatreez symbols. They hold much regional and cultural significance as a traditional symbol in Palestinian embroidery.
“They’re this hidden code that if you learn how to recognize the symbols, you can read the embroidery,” Atallah explains. “You can also tell where the embroidery is from because they are regionally specific.”
Taking inspiration from El Salvador’s flourishing native wildlife, Rodriguez employs a lot of flowers and vines throughout the collection. He explains their significance to his life and subject matter.
“The little flowers growing is a sign of resilience,” Rodriguez says. “You can cut the little stem that is going to regrow, and you can cut a little tree that is trying to grow, but the next year, it’s still going to grow.”
In his piece, “Tus Avisos me Parten El Corazón/Your Notices Pierce My Heart”, the flowers are growing out of his body—a declaration of his resilience but also turning into something more. He explains, “You can break me if you want to. But that is just going to expose what I have inside me, which is my culture, my love for my community, my love for my country.”
Atallah also focuses on the theme of resilience throughout her art pieces. Many of her works, such as “Psalm (Portrait of Mohammad Zakaria)” and “Namesakes (Portrait of Naji Al Ali)", were born from conversations with people from the Arab diaspora. “Just because you can try to erase a people or erase certain histories of existence, there will always be these forces that are pervasive and subversive and demonstrate existence,” Atallah states.
Rodriguez and Atallah explore a variety of mediums, working with oil paints, textiles, metals, and recycled skateboards. This adds a unique perspective and tone to the exhibition that a uniform medium could not provide.
Atallah describes her reasoning for trying different mediums as exploring new horizons. “[I] just creatively wanted to push the boundaries of what painting can be and what I can be doing to move beyond traditional constraints.”
The exhibit occurred from January 21st to February 26th in the Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation Arts Center at the Montgomery College Silver Spring Campus. Make sure to catch the next exhibit and support local artists!
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