From Ramallah To Dubai: How Palestinian Art Is Finding New Collectors
- By: Malak Saleh
At first glance, Mohammed Joha's art appears abstract. There are patches of blue, pink and green against grey, with pieces of fabric, paper and cardboard stitched and layered across the canvas. Look closer and the materials start to tell their own story. Some were salvaged. Others came from Joha's own clothes.
The artist, who was born in Gaza and has lived in Europe for more than two decades, calls the series Houselessness. A part of Joha's story is his retelling of how his home in Gaza was destroyed in war, burying more than 500 of his paintings beneath the rubble. That loss runs through his work. The torn fabric, exposed seams, and various scraps of material stitched together with flashes of colour.
Recommended For YouJoha is among a growing number of Palestinian artists whose work is reaching collectors far beyond where his story originated. At Zawyeh Gallery in Dubai, where Joha showcases his art, founder Ziad Anani says that shift is showing up not just in who comes through the door, but who is actually buying.
Zawyeh started in Ramallah in 2013, with an explicit focus on Palestinian artists, before the art gallery's business eventually expanded to Dubai in 2020. Today, the gallery operates between two very different places: a modest three-storey space in Ramallah and an outpost in Dubai's Alserkal Avenue, one of the Gulf's best-known contemporary art districts.
More than half of Zawyeh's clients are Palestinians living abroad, spread across the UAE, the US, the UK and Europe, Anani explained. But Dubai has put the gallery in front of a different audience. Emiratis and international collectors from places like Russia, Singapore and Thailand also walk through its doors. Some arrive already knowing the artists they want to see. Others know very little about Palestinian art before they enter.
“They come to the gallery, they see something they like, they ask about the price, and they buy it,” Anani said. “Our job is how to deal with this collector, how to introduce Palestinian art in a more informed way and ensure they learn more about what they're collecting.”
That reach is also striking back in Ramallah. Anani estimates that roughly 90 per cent of sales from Zawyeh's Ramallah exhibitions now go to buyers outside of Palestine. Some collectors purchase works online without ever seeing them in person, encountering the piece for the first time when it arrives at their home thousands of miles away.
For Anani, the path to the art world started much closer to home. His father, Nabil Anani, is one of Palestine's most prominent artists, known for his paintings of Palestinian villages, landscapes, and everyday life. Ziad grew up around that work, but when he decided to build something of his own, he didn't begin with white gallery walls or a permanent address. He started in people's homes.
Anani explained that he would take over a house, hang Palestinian art on its walls and invite people inside. One early exhibition brought together 13 artists under a single roof. The exhibitions were meant to move from one house to another, across Ramallah and eventually beyond it.
That was the idea behind the name. Zawyeh means “corner” in Arabic. Anani imagined the project moving from one corner to another, finding new walls for Palestinian artists to showcase and new crowds of people to stand in front of them.
Eventually, Zawyeh found a permanent corner of its own. What began as exhibitions inside close circles now had a fixed address, but the idea of taking Palestinian art beyond those walls remained. And as the gallery grew, Anani's job changed with it. He began learning what collectors already owned, which artists were missing from their portfolios, and what might be worth waiting for. Sometimes that means telling someone not to buy anything at all, to wait because an artist has better work coming, Anani explained.
Zawyeh's expansion has also come at a time when more money, galleries, and collectors are moving through the Gulf. Globally, galleries and dealers generated an estimated $34.8 billion in sales in 2025, according to the latest Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report. The report does not break out the UAE individually, but the country has spent years investing in art and culture, building up its museums, galleries, art fairs, and creative districts.
In Alserkal, at Zawyeh, that market can mean a $500 painting hanging is not far from one priced well into six figures. While Anani says an original work by a younger artist can start at around $400 or $500, work by renowned and established artists like Suleiman Mansour can reach around $150,000.
“Right now I have a work by Samia Halaby at the Dubai gallery priced at more than $150,000,” says Anani. He also recalls Zawyeh showing unique works at Art Dubai priced at the highest end of the spectrum between $280,000 and $360,000.
Despite the prices, for some artists, finding the buyer isn't the problem. “Sometimes, demand for an artist's work is higher than the supply,” Anani said. When that happens, a collector may have to wait for the artist to produce something new.
Palestinian art, Anani believes, was already finding an international market long before October 2023. Zawyeh had been selling work abroad for years, and Palestinian artists had long exhibited outside Palestine. “People started asking specifically about artists from Gaza. Who are the artists from Gaza? Their situation must be terrible. We want to support them,” Anani said.
That wider interest is reaching artists whose work looks very different from one another.
Bashar Khalaf has been making and exhibiting art in Palestine for more than a decade. His latest project, The Field of Dreams, is his third solo exhibition and is expected to open at Zawyeh's Dubai gallery this September. The work was first shown at the A.M. Qattan Foundation in Ramallah.
Ramallah is at the centre of Khalaf's work. He has spent roughly 35 years in the city, watching its buildings rise, its streets change, and its physical footprint expand. He uses those changes to look at something much bigger than the city itself, he explained, which includes what has happened to Palestinian life politically, socially, and economically over time. “The identity of place has always been something of an obsession for me,” Khalaf said.
That characterisation is evident in his exhibition. Steel appears again and again, tangled and piled into structures that can look like something being built in one moment and something closing in the next. Construction and destruction sit alongside one another. So do ideas of protection and confinement.
“Generally speaking, there are several things I explore in my artistic practice that consistently interest me. One of the most important is the relationship between individual and collective identity - between the person and the group,” Khalaf said.
That approach has also shaped how Khalaf thinks about the audience for his work. He says he does not begin a piece thinking about whether a gallery will show it or whether a collector will eventually buy it. “When I work on art, I don't think about galleries. I don't think about people or collectors,” he said.
Khalaf says he believes the audience for Palestinian art has grown well beyond Palestine. He has shown work in Brussels, Malmö, Stockholm, Italy and Algeria, and says international interest has existed for some time.
For Anani, the growing interest in Palestinian art is part of a much broader change that was already underway. But Anani says there isn't one typical collector of Palestinian art.
A significant share of Zawyeh's buyers are Palestinians living abroad, spread across the UAE to the US, UK, France, Germany, and Austria. Anani says the US is an especially large market, while the gallery has also built a growing network of collectors in Jordan. Some of those buyers have never been to Palestine, Anani explained. They find Zawyeh online, at exhibitions or through word of mouth, sometimes after seeing a Palestinian artwork hanging in someone else's home.
A collector doesn't necessarily have to understand every reference to Palestine, Anani explained, or even immediately recognise the work as Palestinian to want it. Some are drawn to recognisable landscapes, embroidery, political imagery or familiar symbols. Others respond to work that is more abstract or conceptual, where Palestine sits somewhere beneath the surface. “It's not always necessary for the art to be clearly, very visually Palestine,” Anani said. “Sometimes, there are undertones; sometimes, the meaning is hidden.”
But whatever the subject, Anani says the work still has to stand on its own. It can be abstract, conceptual or difficult to immediately read, but “visually it has to be beautiful,” he said. The quality of the work and the materials really matter.
But Khalaf says Palestinian artists can also run up against expectations about what their work is supposed to look like. “Certain people have a specific image in their minds of what Palestinian art is supposed to look like or how it is supposed to be presented,” Khalaf said. He is careful not to reject the visual language that came before him. “Iconic Palestinian art and its symbols are excellent, beautiful and extremely important,” he said. But those works, he argues, also reflected the lives of the artists making them and the political and social realities of their time.
“We are living in a somewhat different period now,” Khalaf said. “Politics and society have also changed and that is reflected in me too. What do I want to say through my art?”
Reham Shaheen's work offers a different example of how wide that visual language can be. Born in Gaza and based in Dubai for more than two decades, Shaheen has spent years painting and showing her work in the UAE.
Dubai, she says, has become home. “My work is being created here, my life is here, and in many ways, my art has grown here too,” Shaheen said. But Palestine occupies a different kind of space. “It lives inside my heart. There is definitely nostalgia, and there is a part of me that will always belong there.”
That distance shows up in the work in small, sometimes unexpected, ways. Shaheen grew up in Deir al-Balah in Gaza, where she remembers the sea, palm trees, family, books and the radio as fixtures of her childhood. She says there were fewer distractions then, which gave her imagination more room. Decades later, those memories still surface in her paintings: waves, horses, palm trees, orange trees and, again and again, blue.
Shaheen believes what connects the art to viewers and buyers is bigger than nationality. Her Palestinian and Arab identity, she says, remains inseparable from the work, particularly in the Arabic words and ideas she translates visually onto her canvases. But she still wants the painting to reach the viewer before the biography does.
“The fact that I'm Palestinian, that I'm Arab, and that I'm deeply proud of that identity is certainly part of who I am as an artist - but ultimately, I hope people connect with the feeling in the artwork first,” Shaheen said. “Maybe that's the beautiful thing about art: it can carry where you come from without needing to explain it.”
Still, Shaheen says greater visibility has not necessarily translated into more opportunities for Palestinian artists. “I think we are seeing more visibility and awareness than actual opportunities,” she said. What is missing, in many cases, is the space and support for artists to make the work, she explained. “Give artists the chance to create, and I believe you'll be amazed at what can come out of the ashes,” Shaheen said.
Anani believes galleries like his have a role in creating those chances. Zawyeh's location in Dubai is part of that. “Our presence in Alserkal Avenue puts us in a very important geographic location for art, not only in Dubai or the UAE, but in the Middle East,” he said. He says he has watched the footprint of Palestinian art stretch further and points to the growing number of galleries in the UAE representing Palestinian artists, but says the same thing is happening elsewhere too.
One recent example, he says, was London's P21 gallery's exhibition of Bashar Alhroub. Anani also points to Palestinian artists appearing in Venice during the Biennale, including artists represented by Zawyeh such as Mohammed Joha and Vera Tamari.
For a gallery that began by hanging Palestinian art on the walls of people's homes in Ramallah, the distance the work is now travelling is hard to miss. “I see Palestinian art expanding quickly,” Anani said. “I see stronger representation of Palestinian artists through galleries in the UAE.”
But Anani does not see greater visibility as the end point. Galleries can bring the work to new buyers, but he believes the next stage requires Palestinian artists to have a deeper presence in the institutions that shape the international art world.
“I think Palestinian art needs to be discovered more through institutions, museums, collectors and major art events,” Anani said.
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