16 November 2025 - 11 January 2026
Zawyeh Gallery, Dubai
Unit 27, Alserkal Avenue
In his latest exhibition Houselessness, Palestinian artist Mohammed Joha redefines collage not merely as a visual technique, but as an architecture of rupture and reassembly, both a method and a metaphor. His works bring together scraps of fabric, paper, cardboard, plastic and other salvaged materials, textures pulled from shattered environments and fragments of personal history, to form compressed, jostling topographies. They convey not only violence and destruction, but also endurance and resistance: a continuation of life within erasure.
Born in Gaza, Joha has lived in Europe for over two decades. Yet Gaza remains intimately present in his life and work: his family and friends are still there, many of whom were recently martyred. His home, along with more than 500 paintings, lies buried beneath the rubble. The act of stitching together recycled materials, including torn pieces of his own clothing, reflects an iterative process of healing and comprehension: one that is both personal and collective, and continuously undermined by decades of violence and ongoing genocide.
For Joha, this is where the distinction between Houselessness and homelessness is vital. ‘We are without houses, not without a home. Our homeland is Palestine,’ he says. The loss his works express is not only architectural but existential: a condition of enforced displacement, where lives are rebuilt on ever more precarious ground, with ever fewer materials.
Visible seams and tears convey this sense of fragility and urgency, while tumultuous grey colour fields in works such as Houseless 05 and 06 evoke polluted skies, impenetrable clouds of dust and the psychic weight of living beneath occupation. Yet even these are not without hope. Between the grey and amid the cramped, collaged settlements are glimpses of vivid colour, cobalt blue, canary yellow, pink, purple, green, alongside fragments of pattern, lace, tartan, decorative swirls. These details are memory ruptures: remnants of life, of domestic intimacy, of a world before its most recent devastation. They speak to Joha’s insistence that, even amid destruction, life persists.
While rooted in the specificity of Gaza, Joha’s work carries global resonance. His use of collage echoes diasporic traditions of survival and adaptation, yet with an unmistakably contemporary urgency. In this way, his canvases become not only representations of collapse, but sites of reconstruction: an architecture of dignity, resistance and care.
Mohammed Joha, Artist
ABOUT THE ARTIST: Mohammed Joha was born in 1978 in Gaza. He lives and works between Paris and Marseille. Joha received his bachelor’s degree from the Department of Art Education at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza in 2003 and then joined the summer academy at Darat Al-Funun, Khaled Shoman Foundation, in Amman, under the supervision of the late Syrian artist Marwan Kassab-Bashi. In 2004, Joha won the Young Artist Award of the A.M. Qattan Foundation, after which he was awarded a series of residencies at the International City of Arts in Paris, where he worked to develop his experience, participating in solo and group exhibitions in Europe and the region. He worked for years in the field of painting, and his work was characterized by the spontaneous expressive style using multiple techniques, such as drawing, collage, installation, and other media.
Mohammed Joha has developed a unique expressionistic style of collage with a strong esthetical appeal and multi-layered narrative. Joha’s recent compositions are built on a skeleton of architectural horizontal and vertical lines, organically bent into variation, crossed by precise details appearing on the scene, and brought to life by the colorful materials he uses, including old cloth, paper, and carton.
The depth and appeal of his artwork derive from the formal and clear composition on the one hand, alongside the playful, organic, and carefully placed colorful and light interaction of material and, on the other hand, the serious, suffocating, and devastating reality behind his compositions. Representing the chaotic and organic architecture in Gaza, destroyed, and rebuilt, devastated, rebuilt again with only cloth and whatever else there is as building material, Joha tells the endless story of living in over generations of institutionalized confinement, under the ever-underlying threat of re-destruction, while the over densely populated area steadily grows in terms people living in it. The architectural representation in Joha’s work hints in an unobtrusively direct fashion at the society it houses, caught for eternity between the explicitly temporary nature of their homes, whilst throughout latest history becoming the only perspective there is since and for generations.
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Artist Catalogue, ‘Houselessness’ by Mohammed Joha
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