By Suraj Karowa /ANW
Ramallah, occupied West Bank – November 16, 2025
In the shadowed corners of his Ramallah studio, amid the hum of distant checkpoints and the weight of endless occupation, 82-year-old Palestinian artist Nabil Anani dips his brushes into pigments drawn from the earth itself.
Here, in the occupied West Bank, art is not mere expression—it’s defiance, a quiet rebellion stitched from scarcity and survival. Anani, a cornerstone of the New Visions movement he co-founded nearly four decades ago, embodies a legacy that refuses to fade, even as Israel’s stranglehold tightens around Palestinian creativity.
Born in the fires of the First Intifada in 1987, New Visions emerged as a radical manifesto for Palestinian artists. Co-founded by Anani, Sliman Mansour, Vera Tamari, and Tayseer Barakat, the movement rejected imported, often Israeli-sourced materials in favor of local ones—earth, wool, leather, and clay.
It was a cultural boycott in canvas form, a call for self-reliance amid uprising and upheaval. “We were responding to the Intifada’s raw energy,” Anani recalls, his voice steady over a pipe’s curl of smoke. “Boycott wasn’t just politics; it reshaped our brushes.”
The founders each carved unique paths through this ethos. Anani, entranced by sheepskins’ tactile poetry, layered their textures into landscapes of loss and longing, evoking the pastoral Palestine bulldozed by settlements.
Tamari, now 80, transformed grief into growth: for every olive tree torched by Israeli settlers, she planted a ceramic counterpart in her 2002 installation Tale of a Tree. Layering watercolors onto unyielding clay—mediums meant to clash—she wove in family snapshots and scarred horizons, defying both material and memory’s bounds.
Barakat, 66, alchemized destruction into dialogue, crafting pigments from soil and scorching wood to etch occupation’s scars into abstract forms. Mansour, 78, found renewal in mud’s imperfections.
“I’d hit a wall with national symbols—they felt rote,” he admits. New Visions cracked that open. His Mud on Wood series mosaics clay’s fissures into geometric tales of endurance, where breakage becomes metaphor: “Those cracks? Honest. Powerful. Like us.”
The movement’s ripple extended beyond studios. Exhibitions bloomed locally, regionally, and globally, seeding a generation.
In 2006, the quartet birthed the International Academy of Art Palestine in Ramallah—a decade-long haven before its 2016 merger into Birzeit University’s Faculty of Art, Music, and Design.
“We bridged old guards to contemporary fire,” Anani says. “Local materials weren’t limits; they were liberation.”
Today, that flame flickers in younger hands, tempered by escalating peril. Lara Salous, 36, a Ramallah-based designer, channels New Visions through Woolwoman, her social enterprise fusing Bedouin looms with modern furniture.
Turquoise weaves drape chairs born from shepherd wool and carpenter oak, a boycott-made economy. “Decolonize by returning to the land,” Salous urges. “Support our weavers, shun the occupier’s chain.”
Yet occupation’s vise crushes this vision. Salous collaborates with women in al-Auja and Masafer Yatta—Bedouin enclaves battered by settler pogroms. Israeli forces and extremists raze wells, seize springs like al-Auja’s, and slaughter flocks.
In July, Reuters documented a Jordan Valley rampage: 117 sheep slain, hundreds rustled overnight. “These women are sole providers now,” Salous says, her voice fracturing. Post-October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks triggered Israeli work permit purges, stranding husbands jobless. Weavers, once supplemental earners, now anchor families—until violence halts spinning.
Roadblocks choke Salous’s visits; fear shadows supply lines. “Settlers target grazing, water, homes. Wool dries up when survival screams louder.”
Delays cascade: looms idle, orders stall, livelihoods fray. Even in “stable” Ramallah, Anani laments hide hunts from Hebron—checkpoints as creative culprits.
Gaza’s inferno forges fiercer adaptations.
Eighteen-year-old Hussein al-Jerjawi, from Gaza City’s Remal, repurposes UNRWA flour sacks as canvases, daubing wall paint portraits of flame-lit bread-making and besieged kin.
Inspired by Mansour’s stark realism, he captures occupation’s banal brutalities. But July’s aid siege evaporated those sacks. “No flour, no bags,” al-Jerjawi shrugs. “I’ll buy empties if I must—art doesn’t wait.”
Exiled in Dubai, Gaza native Hazem Harb, whose grayscale abstractions probe identity’s voids, nods to New Visions as eternal muse. “It demands boundary-breaking,” he says, chin propped on fist before a brooding canvas.
Supply chains snap under blockade; he scavenges found objects—rubble echoes shipped from home. “Occupation starves us, but we feast on what’s left: sand, shards, stories.”
Anani, eyes on Gaza’s ghosts, affirms: “They’re improvising with burns, dunes, detritus. Simple strokes for a savage epoch.” Amid 39 days of fragile ceasefire—marred by 260 Palestinian deaths, per reports—this persistence stings. Israel probes “no war, no peace,” analysts say, while PR firms polish the violence.
Detainees rot in underground hells like Rakevet; shadowy buses spirit Gazans to unknown fates via Ramon Airport.
New Visions endures not despite this, but through it—a threadbare tapestry of resilience.
As Salous looms turquoise defiance and al-Jerjawi sketches on scraps, the movement whispers: Create, or be erased. In Palestine’s palette of peril, art is the unboycotted import—smuggled in the soul.