A young man sits on one side of a very long table, facing two interrogators. The time: the nineteen seventies. The place: Beilinson Hospital’s Nursing School. The interrogated: a member of the communist movement. The Interrogators: Shin Bet officers. The room contains a table, chairs, and a medicine cabinet with a red key.

In The Last Pill at Maya Gallery, artist Maria Saleh Mahameed unveils three episodes of her father’s life story: roots and family; the interrogation; and the move to Ukraine.
Saleh Mahameed tells a story with her work. Her art is influenced by personal and familial events, by politics, as well as by everyday life and the society she lives in.

Several pivotal events in her life have impacted her work in recent years, and Maria continues her in-depth investigation of the personal and political narratives that shaped her identity. These events are all intertwined between her life in Umm al-Fahem and Ein Mahel and between Kyiv Ukraine, where her father lived in exile.

“I create out of an internal urge, I touch upon injustice, pain and hope, politics, society, and physical and mental barriers” (Saleh Mahameed)

When Maria Grew up, her father told her about a personal and political experience that altered his life’s course and sent him all the way to the Ukraine. Saleh’s father was a nursing student and an activist in the Israeli communist movement. Shortly before completing his studies and receiving his diploma, he underwent a traumatizing interrogation by the Israeli Shin Bet, who prohibited his employment as a hospital nurse and caused him to upend his life. He emigrated to Ukraine, changed course in his studies and occupation, married a local woman and built a home with her. That woman, Ludmila, is Maria’s mother.

Saleh Mahameed constructs this story in painting, through visual images burnt into her mind and the observer’s mind, from her environment and background, all the while displaying symbols of Christianity and Islam in unity and harmony. Her stories are usually spread out on white canvas scrolls, in a blend of various drawing techniques. Until this exhibition, most of her work was characterized by powerful monochromatic charcoals, but now she also combines vivid pastel colors and soft-pencil drawings that add on a new dimension. Maria often works by spreading her canvas out on the floor, becoming one with the painting in her body and her footprints on the canvas, which make up the painting’s background.

The name “The Last Pill” and the image of the long interrogation table echo The Last Supper – a motif undertaken by countless artists. The paintings themselves reflect the artist’s spontaneous motions and emotions during creation. They touch upon pain and hope, politics, freedom and the restriction of freedom.

Maria’s grandparents lived in Umm al-Fahem. They were born in the beginning of the previous century and lived through changes in local regime – from Turkish and British regime to military government under Israeli regime. The mural depicts the farmer grandfather with sickle and kaffiyah (traditional head covering), and the grandmother holding a baby in a manner echoing the pieta. Mother and son are both depicted as saints with halos over their heads. This image also echoes a painting by Sliman Mansour [1] of East Jerusalem, in which a man carries an object resembling a camel’s hump or a halo, with an image of the holy mosque in Jerusalem. Over the mother’s head, Maria paints a halo in deep pastel colors, with figs and prickly pear fruit, their sweet cores full of seeds. These fruit express the solid connection between the mother and the land. The baby also has a prickly-pear halo, painted in soft pencils, a halo not yet fully formed. The barbed wire twisting along the canvas pricks and shatters the pastoral dream.

The opposite wall addresses Ukraine, the composition centered around the red flag and Kyiv’s Motherland Monument – a woman in traditional garb wearing a victory wreath. These details symbolize pride, freedom and hope for a new life. Maria depicts her exile father’s feeling of acceptance in Soviet Ukraine on one hand, and on the other hand the terrible current conflict between Russia and Ukraine, reflected in the national colors, flags, wreaths and the drawing of clasped arms.

Curator – Ruthie Sagi / English translation - Michal Goren

[1] Sliman Mansour was born in 1947, Birzeit. He studied in the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. Mansour is a founding member of the General Union of Palestinian Plastic Artists. He currently lives in Beit Hanina, Jerusalem.