The Grain of Our Hearts — Galerie du Jour agnès b.
Drawing on the spirit of a poem by Donia Al-Amal, and recalling with spectral bluntness the horror of a war that feeds on the hearts of its victims, six Palestinian artists from different generations revisit, at the Galerie du Jour agnès b., memories and imaginaries of a life once again extinguished. Each invents a language adequate to this reality. Symbols and metaphors collide with the signs of a wounded everyday, turning lived experience into an allegory of loss.
Emphasizing the passing of a voice across generations, the exhibition brings together the visions of Samaa Abu Allaban, Maisara Baroud, Rehaf Al-Batniji, Adel Al-Taweel, Taysir Batniji and Amer Nasser as what they are: singular statements that carry history without being confined by it. Each develops a personal register, an alphabet of forms in which the signs of daily life respond to the need to confront — and perhaps exorcise — them.
In both their concerns and their formal strategies, the artists engage in a broader reflection on the role of art in transmitting history. From imaginaries haunted by exile to the persistence of intimate images — even borrowed ones — that distance cannot erase, each answers, in their own way, the poet’s underlying question: what image, what gesture remains within us, and how might its contours be drawn so it can be shared — so that this seed might survive beyond our hearts?
Of undeniable formal strength, The Grain of Our Hearts unfolds in five distinct moments — as many windows onto a confinement that exceeds us, and that remains, by force of circumstance, locked in a muteness that resounds, deafeningly, for us all.
