Personal sea (2025) is a series of miniature paintings by Mahmoud El Safadi that explore the Mediterranean as a site of memory, inheritance, and continuity. In these works, the artist seeks to impersonate his late grandfather, stepping into his place within the seascapes of the Eastern Mediterranean. By appropriating fragments of his grandfather’s history, he stages an intimate doubling, where geographical proximity and the repetition of scenes across time turn the sea into a theatre of cyclical history.

Between 1939 and 1946, Mahmoud’s grandfather served under the British flag in the Eastern Mediterranean, from El Alamein to the coasts of Palestine and Lebanon. His service coincided with the enforcement of the 1939 White Paper, which sought to restrict Zionist migration to Palestine, producing a maritime space marked by war, empire, and displacement. He spoke little of these years, leaving silences that Mahmoud approaches through archival research, fragmentary accounts, and speculative painting.

The artist’s relationship to the Mediterranean is shaped by its contemporary conditions: a littoral landscape that is at once connective and exclusionary, communal and privatized, fluid and heavily policed. Painted onto playing cards that recall quatorze, a game taught by his grandfather, the images accumulate across time as a visual palimpsest, situating personal and inherited memory within broader histories of struggle, surveillance, and belonging.