Karim Abu Shakra Palestinian, b. 1982

Karim Abu Shakra was born in Umm al-Fahm and belongs to a generation of artists working in the charged space between lived experience and inherited narrative. Educated at Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem, his practice has long been anchored in a return to the same modest subject, one his late uncle was intently focused on as well.

In Abu Shakra’s work, the cactus is a form that carries weight culturally, historically, and personally. In the landscape from which it emerges, the cactus has come to mark sites of continuity and rupture alike, growing where structures no longer stand, persisting where other forms have disappeared. Abu Shakra approaches this symbol without didacticism. Instead, he allows its presence to unfold by repetition, variation, of a single subject through the sustained act of looking. The cactus is famously known as a marker of abandoned or destroyed Palestinian villages, often surviving long after houses have been destroyed, It is widely used to mark old stone terraces and property lines in rural Palestinian areas.

There is also an intimacy to the potted cactus that recurs in his work. Removed from the open landscape and brought into the studio, it becomes both an object of care and a contained fragment of something larger. This tension—between rootedness and displacement, endurance and fragility—runs quietly through the paintings.