The Bateekha show at Gallery 1957 is on display this week in concert with the Bateekha Project which began by Egyptian artist and sculptor Hedayat Taymour. Ms. Taymour began her watermelon sculpture project to celebrate Palestinian identity and culture with the aim of helping families dealing with mental illness from the trauma of war in Gaza. It is a poignant effort and beautifully presented. All proceeds from the sale will to go to help Healing for Gaza. Please enjoy these works and visit the gallery if you're in the vicinity.
"At the centre of Bateekha is the watermelon — bateekha in Arabic — an enduring symbol of Palestinian identity and resistance. Its red, green, white and black mirror the colours of the Palestinian flag, and over time the watermelon has come to embody a visual language of national identity, defiance and cultural pride."
Gabby Samara & Peter Kennard, They Tried to Bury Us, They Didn't Know We Were Seeds, 2026, Mixed media incorporating a living olive tree, 28 x 25 cm.
"Throughout the exhibition, the watermelon becomes a charged site through which artists confront histories of displacement and oppression while insisting on cultural continuity. Memory is treated not as something static or nostalgic, but as an active force — carried through language, inherited forms and material practices that resist erasure. In several works, grief is held alongside possibility, while gestures of repetition, repair and transformation turn the familiar fruit into a marker of endurance, belonging and collective resolve. Taken together, the works move between intimate reflection and shared experience, allowing the watermelon to hold both the weight of loss and the persistence of what survives."
Nada Mobarak, Birds of Paradise, Palestine, 2026, Acrylic on fibreglass, 28 x 25 cm.
Rana Begum, No.1612 Watermelon, 2026, Acrylic on fibreglass, 28 x 25 cm. Courtesy of the Artist and Gallery 1957.
Amale Freiha Khlat, Forget Me Not, 2026, Vintage family tatreez, linen, plaster, epoxy and acrylic on fibreglass, 28 x 25 cm.
