Depletion Alaziz Atef

Zawyeh Gallery - Palestine - 17 Oct. till 17 December 26

Depletion
Alaziz Atef

17 October - 17 December 2026
Zawyeh Gallery, 7A President Circle, Al-Balo'
Ramallah, Palestine

This is an exhibition about the body, pain, and memory; a triad that reads thousands of images and witnesses of severed limbs, shrapnel, and people. It is about artistic bandages and paintings that are crying out. Yet the silence within them is a stifled lament that produces a helpless bewilderment: what can we do in the face of this spiritual devastation and unprecedented historical catastrophe?

It is an exhibition on the wounds of tragedy and the surgery of art. Reality demands scalpels and first-aid tools, rescue, dissection, and the monitoring of a condition and its outcomes. Here, the artist is not a doctor on duty, but a wounded surgeon, and the canvas is a vast bed in the great chamber of existence. Here, on the walls where emergency aid kits are hung, these paintings respond to the alarms of pain, as if asserting themselves as a necessity within reach of the caregiver, the displaced, the returnee, and the afflicted.

Alaziz Atef is a Palestinian visual artist born in 1996 in Al-Arroub Refugee Camp. He lives and works in Ramallah. He holds a BA in Political Science and International Relations from Birzeit University and is currently completing a research-based artistic graduate project in Critical Studies within the Department of Philosophy at the same university, focusing on the role of art in contexts of war.

His practice engages fragility, Palestinization, and endurance not as representational themes, but as visual structures shaped by life under political coercion. Material in his work operates as a contemporary archaeological register, where the surface becomes a site of tension between trace, absence, re-signification, repair, and care. Atef develops a visual language that resists documentation as closure, insisting instead on keeping the event present, unresolved, and open across time and interpretation.

He organized the exhibition Room 14, presenting artworks smuggled from Ofer Prison, at the intersection of art, testimony, and lived experience.