Art Is Resistance, Painting Through Trauma Towards Hope

Fayza Yousef Saed is a working artist, an art therapist, and a trained journalist.
Since leaving Gaza with her three children in the wake of her husband’s death,
Fayza has used painting to chart a path through her own trauma and to map
memories of the homeland she is afraid she will never see again.

The work Fayza has made since arriving in Cairo, where she now lives and
works, is part documentary painting, part deeply emotional surrealism. While
these two modes should push against one another, they instead come together to
create something striking, strange, and compelling.

Today, Fayza spends most of her time working with children as an art therapist.
Like her own triplets, these children are displaced and have lost parents and
carers. Like Fayza herself, they are working through unimaginable pain through
art. They are lucky to have the painter guiding them through the process. Of this
work, Fayza says: Every experience I went through made me more insistent on
being a window to others towards the light.

While she doesn’t shy away from the difficult, Fayza never lacks hope. In fact, she
sees hope as the end goal of art, offering us all a chance to look at the world as
she does, catching a glimpse of Gaza as more than a news story or cause.

Fayza paints to heal and to remember, her brush and colour preserving the
memory of Gaza just as a needle and thread do when women decorate the thobe
with the tatreez patterns of their homeland , embroidering a dress. *

*The art of embroidery in Palestine, practices, skills, knowledge and rituals -
UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage