Exhibition information
In i look to the skies, Jude Abu Zaineh creates a sanctuary rooted in the specificity of Palestinian cultural traditions and open to the infinite expanses above. At its center is Maqlouba, a traditional dish that is always shared, an emblem of hospitality and community of great cultural and historical significance. Maqlouba anchors the work as a layered metaphor for diasporic life, where food becomes ritual, soft power, and cultural preservation, its ceremonial nature binding intimacy to sovereignty. Here, Maqlouba becomes an archive, a vessel for memory, and a catalyst for transformation. Abu Zaineh works across disciplines including bioart, video, sculpture, and textiles, layering methods and materials into an evolving constellation of meaning.
The gallery unfolds like a contemplative space, where patterns repeat across engraved architectural forms, textiles, glass, and wallpaper, enveloping the visitor in a language of visual rhythm and embrace. Archival videos thread through the installation, carrying gestures, voices, and memories forward as acts of preservation within a landscape of erasure. Some of these patterns are cultivated in petri dishes from the remnants of Maqlouba, from foraged plants, soil, and other fragments of everyday life. In these contained microcosms, transformation, migration, and decay occur in parallel, creating a living metaphor for the shifting nature of culture and identity. The petri dish becomes both container and containment, a quiet stage for cycles of preservation and loss.
To look to the skies is to enact a gesture both intimate and universal: in prayer, in grief, screaming, in disbelief, in wonder. This pseudo-sanctuary invites contemplation while also confronting the realities of exile, migration, and displacement, holding space for both refuge and unraveling. The works here are steeped in the tensions between comfort and disquiet, belonging and estrangement, sanctity and the secular. They carry the emotional weight of Palestinian life under colonial violence while offering a horizon, reminding us that wherever we are, we stand beneath the same celestial canopy. Abu Zaineh invites an encounter where the culturally personal and the planetary, the grounded and the infinite, exist in fragile contradictions.
