Promises and Scars
Promises and Scars presents five decades of Sliman Mansour’s relentless search for aesthetic forms and media capable of expressing and responding to the Palestinian condition.
Mansour’s work is often cast as the dream factory of a people denied its homeland and its wholeness. From a single mother’s dream of a house to the mud’s pledge of a new vision and the storm’s promise of a rainbow, his art gave form to hopes both intimate and collective, foretelling an anti-colonial romance with a guaranteed happy ending.
Yet, despite our addiction to his romanticism, Mansour rejected the comfort of easy answers and was more rebellious than we demanded of him. While many saw in him an iconographer of national icons, he was also an iconoclast, repeatedly returning to his own pictures to strip them of the religiosity with which we had endowed them, and to reveal the tragic fate of his earlier romantic heroes.
Laden with our wounds, Sliman Mansour departed our world in August of this year. This exhibition, originally planned to open in April in his presence, now opens in his bitter absence.