Born in Jerusalem in 1942, Kamal Boullata carried Jerusalem with him long before he left it. Now (at the time of the video), based in Berlin, Germany, Kamal’s practice moves between painting, writing, and historical research—tracing the geometry of memory across continents.
In this short Art Dubai video, an annual global art fair in Dubai that is part of the Art Dubai Portraits, a film series that provides a short perspective into the lives of different artists, Kamal reflects on exile, belonging, and the discipline that shaped his abstraction. From learning icon painting in Jerusalem’s Old City to developing a language of silkscreen, calligraphy, and geometric form, his work reveals how early visual training can quietly structure a lifetime of artistic inquiry. The film series is produced in collaboration with Forward James Filmmakers.
Berlin appears not as a replacement of Jerusalem but as an intellectual and musical ecosystem that reopened his curiosity. Between opera houses and philosophical conversations, Kamal describes a late chapter of renewal, one that sharpened his thinking while deepening his sense of distance.
This video is not simply about an artist’s career; instead, it is about how a Palestinian life unfolds across cities, and how “home” can migrate into the work itself.