Zawyeh Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of a solo exhibition by artist Alaziz Atef, titled Depletion, an exhibition about the body, pain, and memory, and about ‘a triad that reads thousands of images and witnesses of severed limbs, shrapnel, and people’ from the ongoing genocide in Gaza. In his works, Atef uses gauze bandages, transforming them into a ‘stifled lament that produces a helpless bewilderment: what can we do in the face of this spiritual devastation and unprecedented historical catastrophe?’

Atef's works engage with fragility as a visual structure born of life under political coercion. In his practice, material becomes a record, and the artistic surface becomes a space of confrontation between trace, absence, the re-creation of meaning, restoration, and healing, in an attempt to produce a visual language that does not merely document the event, but keeps it present as an open wound. The exhibition includes 78 artworks, all produced this year, using materials such as gauze and paper, as well as installation works.

In this context, the poet Ali Abu Ajamiyeh writes: "The ethical responsibility inherent in these works does not point to victims in abstract form or name them on the surface; rather, it summons their phantoms in a deconstructive attempt, placing them at the heart of the story, deepening the meaning of their existence and lives.” He adds: "The originality of these works is not centred on their being an artistic production outside the direct technique frameworks of human expression of tragedy and its visual representation at the centre of a specific time and place: Palestine - Gaza, the genocide war of October 7, 2023; that is the geography and ensuing time of genocide.

It also depends on the material itself, carrying elemental components and raw materials not complicit in the mode of rapid production and consumerist design. It does not dissolve into the notion of modernity and transcendence so much as it generates its own concept of the ‘trace’, in Walter Benjamin’s expression." Atef is a Palestinian visual artist, born in 1996 in Al-Arroub Refugee Camp, and currently living and working in Ramallah. He holds a degree in Political Science and International Relations from Birzeit University, and he is completing the requirements of his research/artistic project in postgraduate studies, Critical Studies in the Department of Philosophy at the same university, on the role of art in war. He organised the exhibition Room 14, which featured works smuggled from Ofer Prison, at an intersection of art, documentation, and lived experience.