Wall 2026 – 35 x 29cm, oil, acrylic, wire, canvas
This painting makes another departure in the Extraction series, it is a compact, almost talismanic piece that applies the core theme of depletion and commodification to the decades-long conflict in Gaza, where land, lives, and resources have been systematically hollowed out by corporate-political forces.
By incorporating the colours of the Palestinian flag (red, green, black, white), this painting along with others in the series doesn’t just reference the site; they embody it as a zone of enforced extraction. Gaza as the ultimate “special economic zone” turned killing field, where infrastructure is demolished, aid blocked, and rebuilding becomes a perpetual cycle of profit for Imperialists.
The works refuse literalism, instead using painterly excavation and illusion to evoke the slow violence of shock doctrine tactics, where crisis is engineered or exploited to pave the way for privatisation and control.
Wall 2026 feels like a vertical cross-section of buried history, a stratigraphic record of conflict and erasure. The surface is aggressively worked: layers of acrylic and oil built up in bands of Palestinian red, green, black, and white, then punished, scraped, gouged, dragged, until the “structurally sound” foundation is compromised, crumbling at the edges like a wall under siege or a flag in tatters.
The wire embedded in the canvas adds a literal tension, pulling the material taut yet threatening to tear it, evoking the barbed wire of borders, checkpoints, or the Gaza fence itself. The excavation reveals underlayers of grey and brown, residue of previous states, perhaps the “normalcy” before the cycles of bombardment and blockade.
Symbolically, this ties directly to Gaza as a site of extraction: decades of land grabs, water diversion, resource stripping, and corporate opportunism (from arms deals to post-conflict reconstruction contracts) rendered as painterly archaeology.
The colors are not triumphant; they are fossilised, buried under their own weight, suggesting that even symbols of resistance are subject to depletion. The vertical format amplifies the sense of compression, Gaza’s 2.3 million people squeezed into a strip, their infrastructure (homes, hospitals, schools) reduced to rubble for geopolitical gain. This isn’t a flag waving; it’s a flag exhumed, scarred, still holding form against the odds.