Illustration in Palestine

Nour Hifaoui is a Palestinian-Lebanese comic artist and illustrator currently based in Paris. Her artistic work focuses on themes of the body, intimacy, and social injustice, which she addresses through documentation and autofiction. In 2022, she published her first zine, "Titties", with Samandal, exploring desire and sexual life from a feminist perspective influenced by social and political events. The comic was translated into Italian and published by D Editore and Fortepressa. She is currently working on the second volume, titled "Titties Too."

Since 2018, Nour has been a member of the Lebanese comics collective Samandal Comics, where she contributes as an author and editor. She was part of the editorial team for the collective’s anthology “Cutes,” which features trans and queer stories. Nour has showcased her work in several local and international exhibitions, such as “In-Transit,” “It’s Preferable Not to Travel with a Dead Man,” and “Ça va être long.” Additionally, she has participated in numerous regional and international festivals, including the “Festival International de la Bande Dessinée d’Angoulême,” “Central Vapeur,” “Crash,” and the “Festival International de la Bande Dessinée d'Alger.”

Sliman Mansour (Arabic: سليمان منصور, b. Birzeit, British Mandate of Palestine, 1947) is a Palestinian painter and writer, considered an important figure in Palestinian art. He has been described as an artist of the Intifada, whose work provides visual expressions of the Palestinian cultural concept of sumud (in English: constancy, steadfastness). He studied fine art at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem from 1967 to 1970 and has been active in Palestinian artistic life since that time. Like other Palestinian painters living in the occupied territories, he has participated in several group exhibitions with Israeli artists. After the outbreak of the First Intifada, he was arrested and several of his works were confiscated for using the colours of the Palestinian flag in his paintings (green, black and red), which was illegal under Israeli law.
From 1986 to 1990 he was director of the League of Palestinian Artists, an organisation dedicated to the promotion of local artists and the organisation of exhibitions.
In 1988 he produced a series of eight abstract paintings evoking four Palestinian villages destroyed in the 1948 war (Yibna, Yalo, Imwas and Bayt Dajan), and participated in Dana Bartelt's exhibition (and subsequent book) Both Sides of Peace: Israeli and Palestinian Political Poster Art, published in 1998 by the Raleigh Contemporary Art Museum, North Carolina. In those years, he was one of the first Palestinian painters to move away from painting and to begin experimenting with non-traditional plastic materials, such as clay and straw, taken as a metaphor for the soil of his homeland.
His works have been shown in solo and group exhibitions in many countries including Israel, Japan, Russia, Norway, the United States, Italy, Spain, France, Germany and Egypt where his work I Ismail won the Grand Prize at the Cairo Biennial in 1998. He is a founding member and director of the Al-Wasiti Art Center in Jerusalem.

As a young boy he has studied a diploma in Illustration in Gaza before he left Gaza to study in Rome, Italy 20 years ago. Now based in Dubai, he is well known as a contemporary artist mixing installation drawing and collage, layered down with geometric precision, he stitches visual artefacts together and forms fresh constructions that invite unheard discourses and a historical rethinking.

He has done many handmade art books such as Illustration, he likes the idea of mixing his art with illustration and maintains an unwavering dialogue with his symbolically charged homeland. Knowing that his place of origin can never be just a 'land', the artist unleashes an ever-evolving repertoire of artistic techniques to negotiate a space which has been carved up and re-drawn many times. Steering away from nostalgia and the fetishisation of displacement, he draws from academia, architecture, as well as European art traditions, to negotiate an axis of complex social and cultural relations; built and natural environments, longing and belonging.