Resistance and the fight for freedom can look like protests, boycotts, or armed conflict. It can also look like an elderly man harvesting a field’s crops, a woman nurturing her children, preparing food, and playing an instrument, or a village stubbornly going about its daily activities and surviving amid occupation and violence.
Palestinian artist Sliman Mansour’s art captures this spirit of resistance through the mundane in his paintings. Regarded as one of the most influential Palestinian artists, he combines past and present by drawing on folk memory, symbolism, and modern allegory (see Sliman Mansour). Whether showing women at harvest, solemn figures in ritual, or phoenix-like allegories of rebirth, his paintings always return to the themes of identity, heritage, and perseverance. In doing so, Mansour has crafted not just an art style, but a visual vocabulary of Palestinian memory and hope.
Stylistically, his work blends figurative realism with allegory and symbolism. Mansour’s figures are often rendered with sculptural solidity—peasants, women in embroidered dresses, olive pickers, and laborers appear monumental, grounded, and dignified. Their presence is both specific and universal: they are recognizably Palestinian but also stand for endurance across different cultures. Mansour frequently layers his paintings with symbolic objects—the olive tree, the key to return, books, doves, and embroidered garments—each carrying dense cultural and political meaning. His compositions are carefully staged to balance narrative clarity with timeless resonance.
Mansour’s use of oil and collage, as we shall see in the paintings included in this album, intensifies the tactile quality, as if Palestinian land is literally stitched into the composition. The overall effect is both solemn and triumphant: out of struggle comes endurance, out of loss comes resurgence. Mansour’s art turns daily experiences into a statement of resilience, showing that even sadness can become part of a collective identity that refuses to disappear.
Mansour’s depictions of Jerusalem in particular are rich in symbolism, history, emotional weight, and political meaning. Pieces that portray the city often emphasize the Dome of the Rock, its old architecture, winding rooftops, and courtyards. Some of his most famous works also show people (often elderly or symbolic figures) carrying Jerusalem. These portrayals suggest that Jerusalem is both a source of strength and a source of pain; it is central to the Palestinian collective consciousness and identity, but also something that bears a heavy weight, both as a locus of identity and longing.
These images, however, are not necessarily celebratory—there is often a melancholy and longing underscoring them. The images contrast what has been lost, what is eroding, and what is remembered. They reflect how wars, especially the 1948 Nakba and 1967 occupation as well displacement and occupation, profoundly impacted Jerusalem.
Mansour’s art reminds us of the different forms of resistance, giving Palestinians a language of images that could circulate where words or politics could not.