Rumination Of History 2023-2024

Rumination of History is an archival work that revisits the clay sculptures of Palestinian potter and artist Hanna Mismar, who, since the 1960s, documented the Palestinian Nakba of 1948 through these sculptures, drawing from his own experience as a child of the Nakba. In my contemporary work, I revisit these sculptures by reproducing them through pencil drawings on paper, while replacing the artist’s original signature with the words “Gaza 2023.” This subtle alteration of the signature shifts the work from an archive of the past into a present that seems to reproduce history itself. The act of redrawing becomes a form of rumination and repetition: a return to an old image, but also a return to an event that continues to recur in different forms. By relocating these sculptures from the 1960s to “Gaza 2023,” I reflect on time and memory, and on the impossibility of history remaining in the past when its traces continue to resurface and repeat in the present. “Gaza 2023” is therefore not merely a new signature, but a temporal and metaphorical reference that brings past and present into the same space, revealing a cycle in which history appears to reproduce itself.