Laila Shawa: Inside Paradise

Curated by Jakub Gawkowski.

The exhibition presents the works of the iconic Palestinian artist Laila Shawa (1940–2022), offering insights into her uniquely trans-cultural visual language. In her art, Islamic ornament meets Western pop art, and Byzantine calligraphy sits alongside graffiti tags. This distinctive idiom—sometimes described as Islamo-pop—is not hybrid in a conciliatory sense but in a critical one: it repurposes inherited forms across cultures to expose systems of power and violence that transcend borders. In doing so, Shawa’s practice both extends and complicates the canon of global contemporary art. With the exhibition Inside Paradise, her work returns to Poland, where it was first shown in 1980 at the Central Exhibition Bureau in Warsaw as part of the exhibition of Palestinian painting.

For Shawa, an artist from Gaza whose life was also intertwined with Beirut and London, art was a means of speaking out—a voice shaped both by her personal journey and by the collective experience of the Palestinian people. Her practice was shaped equally by her studies in Cairo, Rome and Salzburg with artists such as Renato Guttuso and Oskar Kokoshka, as well as by historical religious iconography and the ongoing violence and political traumas of the present. She moved fluidly between mediums—from painting and printmaking to installation—merging an interest in West Asian visual culture, Islamic ornamentation, politics, and mass media. Printmaking, however, occupies a central place in her oeuvre, functioning both symbolically and practically: it allows for the multiplication of images, the amplification of messages, and a challenge to the singular, elite status often attached to art. Historically, printmaking has played a crucial role in democratizing art, enabling social critique and reaching audiences beyond the elite. Within this lineage, Shawa’s works—most notably her Walls of Gaza lithograph series, begun in the 1990s—extend the tradition of socially engaged printmaking, using it as a tool of collective witnessing and public engagement. By harnessing repetition and accessibility to confront structures of power, her printmaking became not only a medium but also a method—a critical practice through which she engaged with the visual culture that surrounded her.

Throughout her career, Shawa critically addressed systems of violence, be it patriarchal, colonial, military, or religious, and turned them into emotionally charged, but often playful visual forms. She understood the commodification of the human body, especially the female body, as a central mechanism of power: whether through religious control, cultural roles, political propaganda, or the global media machine. Her work exposed how the gaze is never neutral, but always instrumental in shaping what is seen and unseen. Herself a breast cancer survivor, Shawa once recalled: “While undergoing radiotherapy, I watched on television the precision bombing of Baghdad by US airplanes, forever linking the two events in my mind and in my art.” For her, the body of a woman and the body of the land were inseparably intertwined: violated, scarred, and politicized. The exhibition features Shawa’s Breast Bombs, presented in mirrored display boxes specially designed by the Danish artist Esben Weile Kjær, creating a kaleidoscopic field of shifting perspectives.

In Disposable Bodies (2011–2013), headless female mannequins are transformed into unsettling sculptures that comment on the media portrayal of female suicide bombers. The series exposes how women’s bodies are turned both into icons of martyrdom and objects of desire, simultaneously erased and sensationalized. Other works point to the criticisms of self-brutalization. In a series entitled Trapped, still images of the screaming person from the CCTV footage are placed behind a mesh of calligraphy. The writing becomes denser until it becomes impossible to read and understand, speaking to the misreading or miscomprehension of religion and ideology. 

Shawa’s lifelong advocacy for human rights, women’s emancipation, Palestinian freedom, and cultural resistance extended well beyond the studio. Her biography was not only about creating art, but also about enabling others to engage in it. After returning from Europe in 1964, she began working as an educator in Gaza and later contributed significantly to building the cultural infrastructure there. When asked by a journalist to name the career accomplishment she was most proud of, Shawa responded: “It would not be a painting, but a building I helped design and build in Gaza. It took 12 years of my life, my father’s life, and my ex-husband’s life to build a cultural center in Gaza that carries the name of my father.” She was referring to the Rashad Shawa International Cultural Centre. Financed by the Benevolent Society for the Gaza Strip, the centre was completed in 1988 as a hub for cultural exchange, events, and performances. Featuring four stained glass panels designed by Shawa herself in the large foyer and library, the building served a wide range of social and artistic functions over the years. In November 2023, it was destroyed by Israeli warplanes. 

Shawa’s art, personal expressions created out of the socially engaged tradition of printmaking and the seductive immediacy of pop-art, delivers subversive political messages but also speaks to complexities of our epoch with beauty and humor. From studying in Salzburg and Rome to integrating the traditions of Islamic geometry, Persian miniatures, and Byzantine icons with pop-art idioms, Shawa created a polyphonic visual language. Her works are seductive, critical, and indignant; they point out injustice and hypocrisy. Her art was always tied to public engagement, but for an artist, as Shawa herself stated, responsibility for the artwork ceases when it leaves the studio: “It takes on a life of its own and how it is perceived depends more on the makeup of the viewer than the intent of the creator.” Her work reminds us that the act of seeing is inseparable from the responsibility of the one who sees.

The exhibition is a collaboration with Salzburger Kunstverein in Salzburg, where its first iteration was presented in the summer of 2025.