Houselessness: Mohammed Joha

In his latest exhibition Houselessness, Palestinian artist Mohammed Joha redefines collage not merely as a visual technique, but as an architecture of rupture and reassembly, both a method and a metaphor. His works bring together scraps of fabric, paper, cardboard, plastic and other salvaged materials, textures pulled from shattered environments and fragments of personal history, to form compressed, jostling topographies. They convey not only violence and destruction, but also endurance and resistance: a continuation of life within erasure.

Born in Gaza, Joha left before the genocide and has lived in Europe for over two decades. Yet Gaza remains intimately present in his life and work: his family and friends are still there, many of whom were recently martyred. His home, along with more than 500 paintings, lies buried beneath the rubble. The act of stitching together recycled materials, including torn pieces of his own clothing, reflects an iterative process of healing and comprehension—one that is both personal and collective, and continuously undermined by decades of violence and ongoing genocide.

For Joha, this is where the distinction between Houselessness and homelessness is vital. “We are without houses, not without a home. Our homeland is Palestine,” he says. The loss his works express is not only architectural but existential: a condition of enforced displacement, where lives are rebuilt on ever more precarious ground, with ever fewer materials.

Visible seams and tears convey this sense of fragility and urgency, while tumultuous grey colour fields in works such as Houseless 05 and 06 evoke polluted skies, impenetrable clouds of dust and the psychic weight of living beneath occupation. Yet even these are not without hope. Between the grey and amid the cramped, collaged settlements are glimpses of vivid colour, cobalt blue, canary yellow, pink, purple, green, alongside fragments of pattern, lace, tartan, decorative swirls. These details are memory ruptures: remnants of life, of domestic intimacy, of a world before its most recent devastation. They speak to Joha’s insistence that, even amid destruction, life persists.

While rooted in the specificity of Gaza, Joha’s work carries global resonance. His use of collage echoes diasporic traditions of survival and adaptation, yet with an unmistakably contemporary urgency. In this way, his canvases become not only representations of collapse, but sites of reconstruction: an architecture of dignity, resistance and care.