From Akka to Gaza / من عكا إلى غزة
Manal Mahamid
2024, 4min
In From Akka to Gaza, I focus on a single creature. It is not fully human, not entirely mythical, but a hybrid presence capable of flying, swimming, walking, and jumping. This figure embodies what one must become to survive within the fragmented geography imposed by colonialism. It is a metaphor for adaptation under constraint.
Akka and Gaza mark two distant points within a landscape that has been divided, controlled, and militarised. The impossibility of moving freely between them defines contemporary Palestinian existence. In this work, I imagine a being that refuses those limitations. It moves through air when the land is blocked. It crosses water when borders close. It walks when it must remain grounded. Its body becomes a site of transformation, shaped by necessity.
The film merges live video footage with animation, allowing the creature to inhabit both the real and the speculative. I am interested in this tension. The landscape we see is recognizable and politically charged, yet the creature disrupts its fixed logic. Through hybridity, I propose that survival requires constant reinvention. To live within such a controlled environment, one must be fluid, elastic, and capable of shifting form.
The creature is neither heroic nor monumental. It is fragile and persistent. Its movement is sometimes graceful, sometimes strained. This ambiguity reflects the reality of Palestinian life, where resilience is not romantic but demanding.
From Akka to Gaza becomes a meditation on mobility as resistance. The hybrid body suggests that in a colonised space, survival itself requires multiplicity. To move across Palestine today, one must metaphorically grow wings, fins, and endurance. The film asks what kind of body is necessary to remain present within a geography designed to confine.
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About Manal Mahamid
Manal Mahamid is a Palestinian multidisciplinary conceptual artist whose practice explores landscape, memory, and the politics of colonial space. Working across printmaking, sculpture, video, installation, and mixed media, she approaches medium as a strategic language within a broader conceptual framework.
Her work critically examines the colonial reordering of land, addressing imposed borders, displaced ecologies, and the fragmentation of belonging. Positioning the environment as an active subject and living archive, Mahamid interrogates how landscapes are mapped, aestheticized, and instrumentalized to reshape identity and collective memory. Through archival research, material experimentation, and hybrid visual languages, she reveals the ideological structures embedded in spatial and environmental transformation.
Mahamid has exhibited internationally in London, Chicago, Cairo, Düsseldorf, Haifa, Ramallah, Jericho, and Berlin, among others. She holds a Master of Arts from the University of Haifa and a second Master’s degree in Art Management and Cultural Policy from University College Dublin.
Her practice articulates an ongoing engagement with cultural survival, ecological justice, and the assertion of presence within contested terrain.
www.manalmahamid.com