Painting Pleasure Into View

Rana Samara likes to say she comes from a “typical Palestinian family.” What does she mean by this? “Traditional,” explains the artist, 39, who grew up in Al-Qubeiba, a small village in Jerusalem. “I make war for everything.” That includes her eyebrow piercing, which displeased her devoutly religious mother, and her fine arts degree: Her dad, whom she affectionately describes as “open-minded,” wanted her to follow in his footsteps and become a lawyer.  

Samara’s belief in collective experience—the “typical”—has long guided her multidisciplinary practice, which tends to focus on domestic sites of daily life. It’s what emboldened her, as an undergraduate at the International Art Academy in Ramallah, to spend several months visiting Al Am’ari refugee camp in Ramallah, where she spoke with women about the logistics of having sex in the camp’s cramped quarters. “It's really hard to make women talk about what they need in an intimate relationship,” says Samara. She could relate: By the age of 18, Samara had already married her first husband and become a mother. When she eventually enrolled in college at age 28, they had three children. Her husband was angry. “He was always telling me, ‘You will never ever in your life sell any painting,’” she recalls.

Since divorced, Samara used his words as motivation, selling one of her early works to the renowned artist Slimane Mansour while still a student. “She had the courage and the brains to be an artist,” Mansour told me over email—an intuition that was confirmed when she opened her first solo show, “Intimate Space” at Zawyeh Gallery in Ramallah in 2016, shortly after completing her degree. Inspired by her research at Al Am’ari and her fascination with taboos, the show included colorful, multiple-perspective  paintings made using acrylic and spray paint that depicted spaces used for lovemaking—bedrooms, living rooms, the inside of a van. Devoid of human figures, they suggest postcoital scenes through small details (discarded clothing, rumpled bedding) and demonstrate the influence of David Hockney, one of Samara’s favorite artists. The show also featured collaborative textile works with an ethnographic sensibility. For Thursday, 2013, women from Al Am’ari  embroidered a tapestry with the weekday name, invoking a euphemism that many married couples at the camp used to make romantic plans. To make Virginity Kerchiefs, 2013, Samara distributed squares of white cloth to dozens of individuals and asked them to express their feelings about certain marital traditions and expectations using needle and thread, then collected and curated them. She got one back that warned, “You are going to Jahannam.” Islamic hell.    

Soon after “Intimate Space” debuted, Samara enrolled in an MFA program at Northwestern University in Chicago, a move that required her to leave her daughter and two sons with her parents in the West Bank. “It was a mess,” says Samara, who chose to withdraw after a year. “I was thinking, ‘I want Palestine. I want my kids.’”

At home in Ramallah, Samara continued making art. Her 2019 show “War Games” was again informed by conversations with refugees—this time children in Jordan, Gaza, and Lebanon—and her own childhood memories. In “Inner Sanctuary,” 2022, a series of untitled works, she returned to the tableaux of daily life—in kitchens, medical offices, bathrooms—but also forayed into the strong Palestinian tradition of landscape painting. Some of the scenes emphasized Palestine’s natural beauty, all rolling hills and olive trees, that recall the works of Nabil Anani, whom Samara considers “the god of the arts in Palestine.” But others include man made elements like an empty swimming pool, breaking from Anani’s tendency to portray Palestinian land with mythic symbols of maternal care. “We cannot always draw this land as a pure land,” says Samara. Even representations of the West Bank Wall feel insufficient to her. “Khaled Hourani did that,” she acknowledges, referring to Hourani’s “Leaping Over the Barrier” series. “But there's something missing,” she says. “I don't see the building of Israel in our painting.”

Samara and I first spoke over Zoom last winter, after the Israeli army had invaded Gaza. (On one occasion, we had to reschedule a call when she was waylaid at a checkpoint.) We discussed some of her paintings, constraints of the art market, and the two works she contributed to “Posters for a Gaza,” a group show at Zawyeh’s Dubai location that raised money for Gazans’ medical care. Now remarried, her youngest child was nine months old—the same age as my daughter—and we compared notes on their development.

When Samara and I speak again in July, the assault in Gaza is still underway, and our daughters are toddlers. Samara is teaching at an arts center where her students are mostly girls and women, and her eldest daughter is college-bound. Samara is starting to paint again after a seven-month hiatus, continuing to explore landscapes and experimenting with resin in place of canvas. This fall, she’ll contribute some of these newer works to a group show at Bab idDeir, an art gallery in Bethlehem with a newly opened outpost in Ramallah; thirty percent of the show’s proceeds will benefit Inash AlUsra, an organization providing care for orphaned children of Gaza. Samara asks me if my daughter has started making art yet. “Not really,” I tell her. “She mostly just eats the crayons. What about yours?” Samara grins and shows me a wall in her living room covered with scribbles. “Her pleasure is to catch a pencil and just start drawing.”  

Rose Courteau: Can you tell me about your posters for “Posters for Gaza” at Zawyeh?

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Rana Samara: The first one, Moqawem Qadem, means “New Resistance.” It’s [from] a photo we have of this kid [Ahmad Manasra] in jail from age 13. This photo is really familiar in our community. So I took the picture and made the negative and just sprayed it on the poster. And of course it’s the colors of the Palestine flag. The second one is Piggy Banks. This is what Gaza's children's piggy banks look like. I wanted to talk about kids in a really direct way. [The show] is a good opportunity to talk about this explicitly in a different country.

RC: The backgrounds look like lace. 

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RS: No, it's flowers. It’s fabric, the same fabric for two posters. I use fabric a lot in my artwork.

RC: What inspired the gold dots on the piggy bank?

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RS: In reality, it would be green, but for me, gold is more powerful. I believe that artwork must be shining, colorful. Even if the idea is depressing, you can present the artwork to make people interested in this work. For me, if I see a painting with someone crying or screaming, I will skip it immediately.

RC: What's your relationship to Gaza? 

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RS: I can’t watch the news. I started feeling shame. We can’t do anything for them. If you cook something in your kitchen and put it on the table and you ask your kids to come and eat, you feel like you are doing something wrong. Like you shouldn't eat, you shouldn't sleep, you shouldn't do anything. But there is nothing in our hand to do. I keep praying for them. [I know] some artists there. I keep asking if they need anything. I help as much as I can. You want to ask the people in that situation if anything goes well, but nothing goes well, nothing is okay.

RC: Can you talk a little more about “War Games”?

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RS: A friend and I started this project with children. I went to Lebanon and Jordan, meeting Yemeni kids and Syrian kids. They have nightmares about war. I made a workshop: They drew their nightmares, then I put them in the painting. I couldn't find permission to go to Gaza. So we met online. I have a friend there, and we managed seven [or] eight children in each workshop. He helped them draw. In that time, I took two courses about art therapy, one here [in the West Bank] and one online. The professor was in Nigeria, I think. 

RC: Your painting Super Mario was drawn from your own experience, not the children’s, right?

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RS: Yeah, [people] always asked me why I didn't talk about my sexual life in “Intimate Space.” I didn't feel it was right. But in this project, I wanted to be a part of this story. I put myself in the age of those children I met. I remember, I [spent] all the time playing Mario Kart. [One day] soldiers came in our house. They [broke] the doors. And my dad, he was talking to me, saying, “Get up, come here.” And I didn’t care. I wanted to play a game. So the soldiers came and removed the remote from my hand and removed the TV. I don't know what happened when [the soldiers] took the video game remote from my hand. I think I closed my eyes. In my nightmares, Mario is really, really big. I’m really small, and I want to catch him, and he wants to put his leg on my head. [For the painting] I was thinking I would draw myself and put Mario in a huge size. Then I decided no, I don't want to put people. I just want to make it big. It’s a really huge painting, so you can feel yourself in the room. I think it's like two meters.

RC: I don't know if this was your intention, but as an American viewer, I interpret the mushrooms from Mario as olive trees.

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RS: Is that what you know? I respect everyone’s opinion. But for me, the mushroom was the soldier.  It’s my story, but it could be yours, and you can make the connections between Mario and the bridge and the mushrooms. I love this in my artwork.

RC: Can you tell me more about Untitled (44), 2022 from “Inner Sanctuary”?

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RS: This painting was about a man in prison. He told me that you will see two beds, right? Here’s one bed. This bed is the bed in his life. The other one is in jail. When he wants to make love with himself, he just imagines the room in his home. So he put the two rooms in the same space, in his mind. In this painting, you see different spaces in the same painting. And we are talking about his mind, too. 

RC: Who was this man? 

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RS: He’s a friend of my friend. He's in jail because of a political issue. Untitled (46) is about [another] man in jail. When soldiers came and took him from his home, he had candy in his hand. He gave this candy to his sister. He spent 20 years in jail. When he got home, his sister opened the candy and ate it. There are many stories, many paintings, in this exhibition talking about jails, but you cannot mention it.  

RC: What was the concern?

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RS: There is a world of art, right? There is a market. At some point, you cannot sell art if it's talking about prisons.