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Biography |
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Shawa studied at the Leonardo School of Art in Cairo before graduating from two art academies in Rome in the early 1960s. In addition to these studies, Shawa took courses under Oskar Kokoschka, in Salzburg, Austria. |
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Shawa worked as supervisor for Arts & Crafts Education with UNRWA in the Gaza Strip while at the same time lecturing on Art Education with UNESCO Institute of Education. This proved to be a highly influential period and re-surfaced in a major body of her work called ‘Walls of Gaza’. Shawa then moved to Beirut where she worked as full time as a professional painter and illustrator of children’s books. |
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Shawa now lives in London and has received notable commissions from The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and The British Museum has also purchased some of her work. Her works from this collection formed part of the recent travelling exhibition ‘Word into Art’ curated by Dr Venetia Porter in both London and Dubai. |
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The photolithographs in Routes form part of Shawa’s landmark series ‘Walls of Gaza II’. Shawa believes that one of the roles of contemporary artists is to record and comment on the signs of their times. Since the beginning of the Intifada, the Palestinian uprising, she has been searching for the method and medium with which to record the raw dialogue appearing on the walls of Gaza, between the different Palestinian factions, and between the Palestinians and the Israelis. |
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The dialogue on the walls of Gaza is a method of communication resorted to by Palestinians. Very different from graffiti known in the West, and in the absence of any mode of communication such as television, it became for a time one of the only viable forms of self expression and communication available to them. |
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Shawa chose photography as her medium in order to give “true dimension to the constant changes of this dialogue and its spontaneous form of calligraphy, which disappeared daily and was replaced by new messages by nightfall.” Working from her photographs, Shawa used silkscreen and off-set lithography to print onto paper. The backgrounds incorporate geometric shapes as colour filters. These shapes carry mathematical and immutable truths, while the colour filters serve to either reduce or emphasise parts of the image. “They are also a suggestion of a sense of order that I hope might eventually prevail in a chaotic and torn country”. |
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