Malak Mattar, born in 2000, is a prodigious artist from the Gaza Strip. Her prolific artistic work portrays the experience of the Palestinian women, and is both an affectionate testimony of life in Gaza, and a sublimation of the traumas experienced under the violent Israeli attacks in the region.


Malak grew up in a family linked to the visual and musical arts. However, she recalls Gaza as a place of sadness and distress, where military planes and emergency escapes punctuated her day-to-day routine. At the age of 13, and after an Israeli attack that lasted fifty-one days in which her neighbor was murdered, Malak began painting in watercolor. The artist admits «not painting despite the war, but because of it», sensing the importance of this documentary work in such violent times.


Due to the geographical constrictions of the Gaza blockade, Malak began sharing her work online - but it quickly gained international appreciation. She has done hundreds of paintings, exhibited in countries such as the United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Palestine, Germany and the United States, in prestigious locations such as the US House of Representatives and the Museum of Palestinian People in Washington DC, or the Cultural Center in New York. In her work, she mainly highlights the women of contemporary Palestine, wrapped in symbolic traditional embroidery and featured in intimate, dream-like moments, evocative of their native, peaceful culture. Abundantly expressive and colorful, her figurative work is an opposition to the tense local oppression - from which the artist emigrated to pursue studies in International Politics in Istanbul.


Malak is also the author of Sitti's Bird, a children's book about her life story and growth in the Gaza Strip, and has been on international tours as a speaker. Palestinian artists such as Mona Hatoum and Tamam Al Akhal are important references to her artistic resilience in an environment of prevalent fear - in which art, as a form of emotional expression, evoques a much-desired freedom.