Personal Info
- Country of residence: Palestine
Information
Palestinian plastic art is considered one of the most important products of the Palestinian people and a fundamental pillar of their national identity, as it reflects the history of the Palestinian people and evokes the twists and turns of life and its various activities, small and large, through drawings of various kinds, engravings, and sculpture, of which the artist Zaki Salam is considered one of his most important symbols and icons.
His biography and path
The Palestinian visual artist Zaki Salam was born in Damascus in 1958 to a family that emigrated from the village of Tantoura in the Haifa district, the bride of the Palestinian coast, in 1948. He graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Damascus - Department of Sculpture - in 1984, and obtained a postgraduate diploma in 2000. Member of the General Union of Palestinian Plastic Artists; He worked as head of the Ceramics Department at the Institute of Applied Arts in Damascus from 1984 to 2008.
He held many solo exhibitions in Syria, Jordan, Italy, and Algeria. He also participated in many international sculpture forums in Syria, Bahrain, and Spain. He and his life partner, the artist Hanaa Deeb, created a distinguished artistic family with their artist children, Sumer, Samara, and Ram. The artist Zaki Salam had many cultural and artistic initiatives that played a role in enhancing cultural life in the Yarmouk camp, where he grew up.
The war conditions and the tragic conditions in Syria prompted him to immigrate to Algeria, where he now lives and works there, and has important artistic achievements and contributions in the country of a million martyrs. The artist Zaki Salam works with different materials, such as bronze, stone, wood, and ceramic. He was distinguished by his extensive technical and scientific expertise to the point that he became a reference for a large number of sculptors throughout the Arab world. Zaki Salam embodied, through his feelings and feelings as a refugee, the pain of his people and the tragedy of asylum and the camp in his drawings and sculptures in particular, which He participated in a large number of Palestinian and Arab cultural exhibitions and events.
From the south of the camp to Algeria
Zaki Salam grew up in the corners of the Yarmouk camp in Damascus, and settled there for many years on Orouba Street, in the care of a wonderful family with a deep-rooted identity that favored and encouraged the education of its children. The goals of the father and mother were achieved after long toil, like the rest of the people of Yarmouk and the Palestinian refugees in and outside the camps, so everyone obtained academic certificates and... Among them is Zaki Salam, whom I visited many times in his house in the basement building to gather the family that I love. The house was like a mini Palestinian museum, the contents of which were jointly created by the artist Zaki Salam and his wife, the artist Hanaa Deeb.
It bothered me that I followed sad news that his workshop had been destroyed and infested with dark bats after 2012. After arriving in Algeria, the artist summoned his memory and ideas to set out again to consolidate national identity through his fine art in another exile. He stressed in interviews and press interviews that the art produced by civilization is killed by war in a short time.
And art, according to what Zaki Salam said in a press interview with the Erem Cultural website several years ago: “It does not know ideology.” This is why I find that art must be a tool for expressing its product. If it follows ideology, it kills him with its rhetoric, and if it sits in its ivory tower, it goes to formalism or literalism. Art is a message that expresses its product, its vision, its history, its culture, and the accumulation of its experience in researching form, content, and craft. There is no doubt that my presence within the center of the circle of the Arab-Israeli conflict left a fundamental impact on my life. I was born with it, and perhaps it will leave with me. Thus, from the emotional side, most of my works went into expression. About the aspects of this conflict and its effects on the people around me.
The works of the artist Zaki Salam were characterized by sadness because they are emotional manifestations, as he pointed out in more than one interview, and that their main focus is life in light of the conflict with the rogue occupying state Israel, and that he lives within this conflict, and as much as he was honest with himself, this characteristic was evident in his works.
Because of his close connection to his national identity, the artist Zaki Salam shook off the dust of the new forced departure to embark on fine artistic works as we are accustomed to, and of course Palestine, its people, and the Palestinian national identity are the greatest present throughout it, and thus he is the guerrilla artist who fights on an important and influential front of the national struggle.
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Achievements and Awards
- Years in active
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