Culture & Arts
Sliman Mansour, who painted Palestine's steadfastness, has died at 79
Image credit: Sliman Mansour at the Palestine International Book Fair, 2023 — Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 · License
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An old porter walks out of a stony landscape with the city of Jerusalem roped to his back — the Dome of the Rock, the walls, the domes and roofs of the whole Old City, carried like a load a man has agreed to carry.
Sliman Mansour painted that picture in 1973 and called it Jamal al-Mahamel, the Camel of Burdens. He died in Jerusalem on Monday 24 August, at 79, and it is fair to say that no other single image has done as much work for the Palestinian idea of itself.
He was born in Birzeit in 1947, a year before the Nakba, and graduated from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem in 1970. He kept a studio in Ramallah for the rest of his life.
The vocabulary he built#
What Mansour did, over more than five decades, was assemble a visual language a whole people could read without instruction: the olive tree, the embroidered thob, the woman's face, the terraced hill, Jerusalem itself.
Jamal al-Mahamel left the gallery almost immediately. Reproduced as a poster, it went onto the walls of houses, offices and shops from Nablus to Santiago, which is the fate every artist wants and few get.
The occupation understood the power of the vocabulary. In 1980 an exhibition of his work was shut down by Israeli forces three hours after it opened, and the reason given was the flag — not only painting it, Mansour recalled, but the colours themselves.
Mud, henna and a refusal#
The First Intifada turned method into argument. With Nabil Anani, Vera Tamari and Tayseer Barakat, Mansour founded the New Visions group and stopped buying Israeli-made art materials.
He worked instead in what the land gave: mud layered and moulded over wooden armatures, henna, straw, leather. As the mud dried it cracked on its own, and he let it — figures that carry their own fragility and the passing of time in their surface.
That series, I Am Ismail, won the Grand Nile Prize at the Cairo Biennial in 1998. He showed at the Sharjah Biennial in 1995 and brought The Fabric of Memory to the Sharjah Art Museum in 2003, and in 2019 he received the UNESCO-Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture.
The institutions he left standing#
Mansour built rooms for other artists as steadily as he built pictures. He led the League of Palestinian Artists from 1986 to 1990, co-founded the al-Wasiti Art Centre in East Jerusalem in 1994 to hold Palestinian art and reach artists in exile, joined the founding board of the International Academy of Art Palestine in Ramallah, and taught at al-Quds University from 2000 to 2014.
A stroke in 2021 took some of his physical range and none of his discipline. He kept going to the studio, and the work of the last years moved toward abstraction under the weight of Gaza.
Our fight now is to tell the world that we are full human beings. We are not less than any other people in the world.
Sliman Mansour
His family said he leaves "a life filled with beauty, memory, and a legacy that will continue to live through all those he touched". Anyone who has seen the poster on a wall in Ramallah, Amman or Chile already knows the size of it.
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