SZ: On the Boards | FALL 2025

DESIGN | BUILD

Storybook Pond Residence.

Surrounded by towering maple and pine trees, a babbling brook leading to a frog pond, the scene is set for an Artist’s studio and family home. The extensive transformation in Duvall, WA is rooted in connecting an open layout to its natural environment.

Large gable-end windows compliment a continuous 30’ ridge skylight, flooding the main living space with warm diffused light. An expansive kitchen opens to the dining area and is booked-ended by a living room with a stone wrapped fireplace. This great room connects to a large outdoor deck, bridging the garden views.

This home is designed to the specific programming needs of our client, allowing for a tranquil primary suite with a floating tub and custom sauna. Other amenities include a dog-washing mud room, hydraulic elevator, art studio space with a private deck overlooking the landscape, providing ample inspiration.

From elegant detailing to larger architectural concepts creating clear axes and open flow, this design offers a nod to the previous farmhouse home, while introducing a modern experience. A carefully curated material palette brings natural elements inside and out, with stone wrapped walls, natural finishes, warm textures and accents of wood throughout, blending into its surrounding landscape.

SZ GALLERY

PERSIAN GARDEN by Monir & Mehdi Ghanbeigy.

SZ Gallery’s 5th Persian Garden is an exhibit that tells culturally rich stories of Persian culture through contemporary and classically-influenced pieces. Monir & Mehdi Ghanbeigy from Iran have created multimedia artwork together since 1970, combining Mehdi’s detailed work with Persian miniatures and painting, Monir’s background in ceramics, and their mutual love for the history of Persian art.

Monir and Mehdi began working together in Iran before they moved to England for further training at London and Canterbury College of Art. After returning to Iran in 1980, they developed a novel style in ceramics and painting, influenced by both modern art as well as the very rich traditions of Persian pottery and storybook miniatures. They have shown their art at numerous national and international exhibitions, including the 2012 Venice Biennial, and have taught for many years at several universities in Iran and in their private workshop. Their pieces are permanently on exhibit at the Contemporary Art Museum in Iran, as well as several museums around the world.  

SZ Gallery & Ya Hala welcome the community EVERY FRIDAY, 6-9PM to our pop-up cafe and community night, in good faith, inviting a spirit of empathy with and curiosity of the Palestinian experience. Racism of any kind will not be tolerated.

Anti-Palestinian Racism is a specific form of anti-Arab racism that silences, excludes, or dehumanizes Palestinians and their narratives. It often manifests in ways that include:

• Refusing to recognize Palestinians as an Indigenous people with a collective identity and legitimate claims to historic and occupied Palestine

• Erasing their human rights and equal dignity

• Excluding Palestinian voices and pressuring others to do the same

• Defaming Palestinians or their allies as inherently anti-Jewish, sympathetic to terrorism, or anti-democratic

Source: Institute for Understanding Anti-Palestinian Racism

PALESTINIAN ART

HOUSELESSNESS by Mohammed Joha.

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.

SUZANNE’S VISIT TO LEBANON, 2025

WHAT THE RETURNING DO by Zeina Hashem Beck.

Three years of absence bring dead things & new love.
Here’s the old house. What you smell is true, love:

bird carcass trapped between wall & flower pot,
so you do what the returning do—love

what you pound with broomstick until
dried bones & feathers fall. Who, love,

can say if this century is worse than others?
& despite what you know & knew, love

comes back as your city, or your old friend
dipping fries in labneh. They ask you, Love

have you been cured or are you still
an optimist? Does the woman who grew love

& flowers inside empty gas grenades
still bring you hope? They say, few love

the way you do, but they forget
(it’s been a while) they, too, love

olives, though they’re tired of odes
& eulogies. You wake & pursue love,

look in the mirror, read the news. Sometimes
you wonder how two loves

so conflicting persist. Then you remember
driving away can get you through love

& borders & some of the days. You can’t predict
what time decides. How’s the view, love?