The symbol as resistance: Sliman Mansour preserves Palestinian history through art

Nearly every day, Sliman Mansour makes the hours-long journey between his home in Jerusalem and his studio in Ramallah. The Palestinian painter has been documenting his people, their ancestors, their land, and their fight for liberation for over half a century. 'Anything that is Palestinian, even just being here, breathing and thinking, is a sensitive matter to the Israelis because they built their narrative around denying our existence,' Mansour said in a video interview with Hyperallergic. 'Our work not only as painters but as intellectuals — in culture, in everything — is to express that we are here.' Over the years, he has chronicled the history of Palestine's six-decade-long resistance. Today, the 76-year-old artist's paintings, sculptures, and cartoons are more poignant and urgent than ever. His evocative studies of everyday life capture the carnage and sorrow of the occupation as well as the enduring resilience and beauty of his community. In some works, halos frame the subjects' heads; in others, ropes bind their hands behind their backs. Women embrace children or cradle symbols of the land: oranges, olive trees, doves. In a radical act of defiance, some landscapes rewind time, showing natural Palestinian topographies before they were wiped out by Israeli settlers in the late '60s. THE OCCUPATION AND ART Mansour was born in Birzeit, a Palestinian town north of Ramallah, in 1947, a year before the Nakba, which saw more than 700,000 Palestinians forcibly expelled from their homes to make way for the creation of Israel. The young artist took to drawing from a very young age and later a German tutor at a boarding school in Bethlehem noticed his talent, encouraging the young Mansour to delve deeper into painting and entering his work into art contests. 'He applied for my work to be a part of a drawing club and then told me that I had won a competition for the United Nations Children of the World. That was in 1962,' Mansour recalls. For his efforts, the teenage Mansour won a $200 cash prize but more importantly, he came to the realisation that he would like to pursue art in a more serious way. The 1960s were a period in which a strong sense of national identity was taking form among both Palestinians and Israelis. The Israeli self-narrative during this period was one which largely erased the Palestinian presence on the land of historic Palestine prior to Zionist migrations of the early 20th century. It was a period in which there was a heavy emphasis on inaccurate tropes, such as the idea that modern Jewish settlers in the region had encountered a barren and sparsely populated land; that they had made the desert bloom. THE SYMBOL AS RESISTANCE Besides the olive tree, Mansour's work features a number of other symbols that are associated with the Palestinian struggle, such as the Jaffa orange, thobes embroidered in the traditional tatreez style, the dove and the keffiyeh scarf. 'When I paint orange trees I am painting land that was occupied in 1948, and when I paint olive trees, I am painting about land that was occupied in 1967,' he says referring to the Nakba, as well as the later Israeli conquest of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. Another more recent symbol, according to Mansour, is the cactus plant, which he says has become associated with Palestinian resistance and struggle. THE PALESTINIAN ARTIST Over the decades, Mansour has amassed a dedicated following and gained international recognition for his work. He was awarded the 2019 Unesco-Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture; he also received the grand prize at the Cairo Biennial in 1998 and the Palestine Prize for Visual Arts in 1998. Today Mansour dedicates his time to mentoring young artists and students, providing them with the opportunity to nurture their creative abilities and benefit from his lifetime's experience. As an artist, Mansour says he would rather steer clear of politics. But as a Palestinian, art is a way out; a way to appease a conscience that will not allow him to look away from the fact of occupation.