Sharif Waked

Sharif Waked chose to produce a site-specific installation of his 2002 work Jericho First. It is a visually striking piece that takes over an entire room and consists of a bright red on white series of small computer-generated graphics produced by a mathematical formula fed into a software, culminating exponentially into one large graphic. Jericho is believed to be one of the oldest, continuously inhabited cities in the world, and is now under Israeli occupation in Palestinian territories. Waked takes a contemporary postcard depicting an 8th century Islamic floor mosaic excavated in the palace of the Umayad Caliph Hisham (Khirbat al-Mafjar) as inspiration and point of departure for 18 paintings and a wall mural. In the mosaic, a gazelle is being preyed on by a lion under the tree of life, while two nearby gazelles continue their grazing. Waked creates abstracted, minimalist images of the lion and the gazelle, progressively intertwining them across small format paintings that by the time the viewer reaches the final image, the lion and the gazelle form a unified ball with a tail being the only feature that makes them recognisable from the original drawing. Do predator and prey become one? Has the predator finally devoured his prey? Or is the predator in fact posing as the prey? The relevance of archaeological findings, their reading and conservation in this area of the world are loaded with political meaning and consequences. Waked’s reading of the image of a lion attacking a gazelle under the tree of knowledge while the others watch, clearly comments on the historical and ongoing state of occupation, as well as the obscured roles of actors and witnesses, predators and prey, and those who continue grazing regardless.
 
Sharif Waked was born in Nazareth to a Palestinian refugee family from the village of Mjedil. He lives and works in Haifa and Nazareth. Waked has exhibited at various biennials, museums, and art venues internationally. Waked’s works include Melancholia (1998), Zoom (1999), Jericho First (2002), Chic Point (2003), Tugra (2008), To Be Continued… (2009), and Beace Brocess (2010). Waked’s work is part of the permanent collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (NY), Sharjah Art Foundation (UAE), Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la création (Paris), Queensland Art Gallery, South Brisbane, Australia, and the Barjeel art foundation (UAE), among others.