It is rare that Palestinian artists from the West Bank and Gaza Strip are able to travel abroad and experience a reality free from military occupation. The work in Bashar Hroub’s first UK show was, however, produced while he has been living and studying in the UK, his first experience of working in physical freedom.  Paradoxically, creating work outside the strictures of “internal exile”, a condition from which anyone living under Israel’s occupation regime of arbitrary and stringent restrictions on movement cannot escape, has also enabled Hroub to imaginatively explore the notion of place and landscape almost in abstraction: how does place relate to and affect consciousness, how does it influence identity and how can art universalize the painful relationship between the imagination and the homeland?

Bashar Hroub was born in 1978 in Kharas near Hebron in the Occupied West Bank. He studied oil painting at Al-Najah National University in Nablus (2001). He has recently been living and working in Ramallah and is currently an M.A. student at Winchester School of Art in the UK.

6th May – 3rd June 2010