Part One: Foundations
Four artists refuse victimhood through vision
In a world determined to reduce Palestinian existence to headlines and statistics, Palestinian art faces many challenges. Through the Palestinian Artists Consortium, Ahmed Hmeedat has launched a virtual platform that brings artists together—building something that cannot be bombed, sanctioned, or silenced: a collective vision of Palestinian life that transforms narratives of victimhood into declarations of hope, beauty, and unshakeable resilience.
This is not a story about individual artists working in isolation. This is about shared resistance through creation—about painters, educators, and visionaries who understand that every brushstroke is an act of defiance, every canvas a refusal to be erased, every exhibition a testament to the enduring power of Palestinian culture.
Across two features, we explore how these established voices have built the foundation for this movement, and how these established artists are evolving it into something unprecedented.
Part One introduces the architects of this vision: Ahmed Hmeedat, an artist from Dheisheh Refugee Camp, who three years ago chose to create a virtual collective for Palestinian artists. This platform seeks to connect Palestinian artists with the world. Alaa Albaba was one of the first artists who joined this appeal. With his brush, he transforms refugee camp life into vibrant expressions of hope from his studio in Al-Amari Camp near the city of Ramallah.
Their stories are told as interconnected threads in a larger tapestry—one that proves Palestinian art is not about dwelling in the past, but about reimagining the future.
In his studio within Al-Amari Refugee Camp, surrounded by canvases that burst with unexpected colour, Alaa Albaba reflects on what it means to create art in 2025. The space he founded as “ON THE WALL Studio” in 2011 has become more than just a place to paint—it has become proof of possibility.
“For me, art is a refuge for hope and a space to let go of all of the psychological pressure that I face as a human in 2025,” Alaa explains, his voice carrying the quiet intensity of someone who has found sanctuary in creation itself. “I feel that I am lucky or blessed somehow because I could paint and escape into my own mental world.”
This sense of refuge wasn’t accidental. When Alaa established his studio more than a decade ago, he was driven by a simple but revolutionary idea: to change how the world sees refugee camps. “At that initiative, I tried to change the stereotypical perception of camps and prove that camps could be a studio or a gallery to display art,” he says. It was, at its heart, a community art initiative—one that would challenge everything people thought they knew about life in Al-Amari.
The world sees refugee camps in greys and browns, in images of concrete blocks and narrow alleyways. But Alaa sees something entirely different when he looks at Al-Amari. His Camp series reveals this vision—buildings that seem to rise like colourful balloons towards the sky, dreams and aspirations lifting from the very ground that others perceive as confining.
“Some people see them as slums, randomly jammed houses with no privacy,” Alaa acknowledges, understanding how the outside world views places like his home. “For me, I see the camp as my warm home, full of colours and life. Many people avoid driving through or walking through refugee camps, but if they do, they will find a lot of things to see.”
This transformation isn’t naïve optimism—it’s deliberate artistic resistance. Alaa’s rigorous two-decade journey in art has trained him to see differently, to add colours with what he calls “discretion and wisdom.” Each brushstroke becomes an act of reclamation, each vibrant hue a refusal to accept the world’s limited vision of Palestinian life.
His approach to painting itself reflects this philosophy. Working between two studios—a spacious area at the entrance of his home where he hosts guests and prepares canvases, and a quieter space on the third floor where he creates without interruption—Alaa has developed his own distinct process. “I do not like to paint on white plain canvas,” he explains. “I prefer to start with a colour wash to help me see better the tones of other colours I use.” He stretches his own canvases and creates his own frames, preferring high-quality acrylics with metallic touches that will ensure his work endures.
“I seek to capture life, colours, hope, and the opposite of reality that camp infrastructure implies,” he explains. Where cameras capture the cramped spaces and difficult conditions, his paintings reveal what cameras cannot: the humanity, the stories, the memories that pulse through every corner of Al-Amari.
For Alaa, this isn’t just about creating beautiful pictures. “There are lives and stories in the camp, and what I seek is to turn the public story into a personal one,” he says. “In the camp, there are memories, and I attempt to highlight them for the viewers so they can be seen differently.”
This mission extends far beyond the boundaries of Al-Amari through his Fish Path project, an extraordinary journey that took him across Palestine, Lebanon, and Jordan to paint 18 murals in refugee camps. The project springs from a deeply personal place—his own family’s story of displacement from Lod to the mountains, and his discovery of profound connections between fish and refugee experiences.
“This project means a lot to me. It is about my story as a Palestinian refugee who was born and raised in Al-Amari Refugee Camp,” Alaa explains. “My grandparents came from Lod, which is now completely under Israeli full control. For me, I use fish as a refugee’s symbol. As you know, fish do not quickly adapt to new waters. And in some cases, they might die if they have been forced to live in new water.”
The metaphor deepens with his observation about sardine tins—a staple of UN aid distributions in refugee camps. “I use the sardine tins in my paintings to represent a side of life in refugee camps,” he says. “Sardine tins are very crowded, the same as camps. Sardines do not belong in a tin, as refugees do not belong in the camp.”
This insight led him on a remarkable journey across refugee camps, travelling to Lebanon six times to paint murals in Shatila Camp, Burj Albarajneh, Mia Mia, and Al-Burj Alshamali, then continuing to camps in Jordan and throughout the West Bank. “I had a dream to go to Syria and paint a mural at Yarmouk Camp, but the Syrian civil war prevented that,” he reflects, his voice carrying both disappointment and determination.
For over a decade, Alaa has been creating in the same space, through uprisings and raids, through restrictions and the weight of everything happening now. His art has evolved beyond personal expression—it has become a form of collective survival, a way for an entire community to see itself through new eyes.
“What I create reflects the reality and the pattern of feelings for people in the camp,” Alaa explains. This reflection goes deeper than documentation; it’s about transformation. The camp holds more than one generation, more than one story. “In the camp, there are memories, and I attempt to highlight them for the viewers so they can be seen differently,” he says. It’s this act of highlighting, of bringing forward what might otherwise remain unseen, that makes his work essential not just as art, but as testimony.
Children are central to this mission. When young Palestinians from Al-Amari enter his studio, something magical happens. “I feel so happy when I see a child from the camp inside my studio,” Alaa shares. “Usually, a child asks me a lot of questions and expects me to help him find answers; however, he makes me think of many ideas which were triggered by his questions.”
But Alaa dreams of something even larger than the immediate impact on his community. “I dream that one day my art may turn into a historical dictionary and be a source for the next generations,” he says, his vision extending far beyond the present moment. “By it, people could see Palestine through my work and could understand how we lived here.”
This isn’t just hope—it’s a profound understanding of art’s power to preserve truth in ways that official narratives cannot. “History might be mistaken, and the most credible is the human personal story,” he reflects. “Art does not lie, unlike history.”
When asked what brings him pure joy in his daily creative practice, his answer captures the essence of why he continues, day after day, canvas after canvas: “Creating new artwork. The practising artist does not need a therapist. Art is the best tool to get rid of all life challenges, in my opinion.”
Alaa’s transformation of Al-Amari from grey despair into vibrant hope represents one artist’s revolutionary vision. But what happens when that vision becomes a platform—when individual acts of resistance connect to form a collective movement? This is where Ahmed Hmeedat’s story begins: not in a studio, but in the recognition that Palestinian artists needed more than talent. They needed infrastructure, strategy, and someone willing to build bridges between creation and the world.
Ahmed Hmeedat grew up in Dheisheh Refugee Camp in Bethlehem, but his journey took him far from those origins—to law school in Jerusalem, to a master’s degree at Syracuse University in upstate New York, to the professional art scene in Washington, DC. It was there, volunteering and then working with the Museum of the Palestinian People, that he began to understand what Palestinian art could become.
“For over 10 years, I have been working with art institutions in Palestine and in the US,” Ahmed explains. “My time in Washington, DC gave me deep experience in the professional art scene—meeting artists, visiting museums, seeing new exhibition methods, and understanding how the art market works. This granted me the vision to contribute to the art scene in Palestine in a positive way.”
The Museum of the Palestinian People became Ahmed’s training ground, teaching him not just about curating and exhibiting, but about narrative itself. “What makes the Museum of the Palestinian People interesting is that it’s not about telling the victim’s story,” he reflects. “It is a museum that tells the story of resilience, the story of hope, the story of resistance. This is what I brought back with me to Palestine.”
When he returned in 2019 after five years in the United States, Ahmed began working on his own art—a series of blue portraits called Searching for the Blue. But as he started building his own website with a local web developer in Bethlehem, something shifted. “At the early stages of that project, I asked myself, why am I doing this for myself, why am I being selfish?” he recalls. “It shouldn’t be about me; it should be about the others. And in my service to others, I hope to learn more. I hope to get to know more people. It gives me meaning. It gives meaning to my life because I’m empowering other artists.”
This realisation became the seed of the Palestinian Artists Consortium—a platform that would give Palestinian artists what they needed: visibility, infrastructure, and a pathway to actually sell their work and sustain their practice.
But Ahmed brought something unusual to this artistic endeavour: his legal training. With degrees in international law and human rights, he approached building the consortium with methodical discipline. “Studying law taught me discipline and how to follow a methodology of research and apply analysis to many things in my life,” he explains. “I developed self-discipline and research methodology to achieve what I would like to achieve. And I have applied that to the consortium.”
This meant starting with strategy and vision. It meant meeting with every artist individually, in person or online, and presenting them with contracts—in English or Arabic, whichever they preferred. It meant making the crucial decision to register the consortium as a company rather than a non-profit, despite pressure to do otherwise.
“I was against the idea of doing a non-profit because it’s hard to operate when you have a limited team,” Ahmed explains. “The end goal of the consortium is to empower artists financially and enable them to pay for their bills and for their families. My main goal is to help them sell their artwork. This is what the artists really care about—to create art and be able to sustain what they are doing.”
“To this day, I’m still paying from my pocket to keep the consortium going,” Ahmed admits. “It’s a company, it’s a business, but we haven’t had the breakthrough in selling a lot of artwork yet. But I believe in consistent work, to keep going, to feature artists and expose their artwork and their stories. We’re going to succeed and enable them to sell their artwork and find new homes for their paintings, sculptures, and photos.”
Yet beyond the practical infrastructure, Ahmed brought a philosophical vision to the consortium—one that challenged conventional narratives about Palestinian art and Palestinian identity itself.
“I am always hopeful. I’m always optimistic,” he says. “I approach things in life with the pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will, as Antonio Gramsci once said. I have a realistic vision of the context and situation around me, but at the same time, I keep dreaming and I keep hoping for the better and the best.”
This philosophy shapes every artist he recruits. “I started to look for artists who create artwork that tells the story in a different way,” Ahmed explains. “For example, Alaa Albaba from Al-Amari refugee camp portrays the camp in beautiful, diverse palettes of colours. His studio is already hopeful. He shows that his eyes see the camp in a different way. Haya from Jericho is drawing figures that are smiling, despite the fact that they represent a devastated situation. Her figures, her abstracts, are in hopeful colours.”
Then Ahmed articulates what might be his most radical position: “We should keep creating art that tells a different story of resilience, a story of hope, and step away from—I mean, I appreciate commemoration and exposing the true and sad side of the Palestinian situation—but it’s not everything should be about commemorating the past and exposing the victimhood story. We are victims if we believe that we are victims. I like to look at my people here, my friends, my family, and myself as heroes. I totally reject the story of victimhood.”
This isn’t a denial of suffering or dismissal of legitimate pain. It’s a conscious choice about which narratives to amplify, which futures to imagine. It’s the difference between art that documents trauma and art that transforms it.
The reality of running the consortium whilst teaching at university, creating his own art, and managing the complexities of Palestinian life under occupation is overwhelming. Yet the practical challenges go far beyond personal time management. Operating an e-commerce platform for Palestinian artists means confronting the reality of Israeli control over Palestinian economic infrastructure.
“We have a lot of payment issues. Sometimes we cannot get the money. We lost a lot of money through PayPal because PayPal refuses to operate in Palestine, and Israel controls all the pipes of money that come through e-commerce,” Ahmed explains. “I hope to solve this issue and grow the consortium. I want to recruit more artists. I want to have at least 30 artists by the end of next year.”
His vision extends beyond Palestine’s borders, particularly towards the American market. “I’m targeting the American market mostly because a lot of people in the States love art and would like to purchase art,” he says. “This has been part of American culture since day one. Americans during the 18th and 19th centuries travelled to Europe and bought almost all of the Impressionist collections. There is something special in the American people about their appreciation of art and their willingness to support artists.”
But the consortium’s mission isn’t limited by geography. “I’m building a community overseas, a community of people who love Palestinian art, who cherish Palestinian culture and heritage, people who are aware of the context of Palestine—whether they are Palestinians or non-Palestinians. The consortium is about creating a virtual hub where artists can bring their artwork and exhibit it.”
Ahmed’s hopes for the consortium are both practical and profound: better payment systems, more marketing campaigns in the US, and recruitment of serious, full-time artists who create regularly and want to stay connected to the art field. But underlying all of this is a deeper mission—to create a platform where Palestinian artists can be seen not as victims requiring pity, but as creators deserving recognition.
“I seek for the consortium to be a hub where artists could bring their artwork and exhibit it,” Ahmed reflects. “And through this, I hope to show the world that Palestinian art is about resilience, about hope, about resistance—about people who refuse to let their creativity be silenced.”
Standing between his legal training and his artistic heart, between Washington DC’s professional art world and Dheisheh Refugee Camp’s lived realities, Ahmed Hmeedat has built something that embodies his deepest philosophy: that service to others gives meaning to life, that optimism is a choice as much as pessimism, and that Palestinians are not victims waiting for rescue—they are heroes creating their own futures, one brushstroke at a time.
The foundation is now laid. The platform exists. The infrastructure is built. And on this foundation, established Palestinian artists continue to evolve their practice—artists who have never known a world without occupation but who refuse to let that define the totality of their creative vision. Their voices, their innovations, and their evolution of Ahmed’s movement will unfold in Part Two.
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