Note to Correspondents

Photo Exhibition to Mark International Day of Solidarity with Palestinian People

Opens at Headquarters Visitors’ Lobby, 29 November

 

A photo exhibition entitled “Palestinian Vista” will be launched at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, 29 November in the Main Gallery of the Visitors’ Lobby in observance of the annual International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.

Presented under the auspices of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, the exhibition features paintings by Ibrahim Shalaby, a Canadian-Palestinian architect and artist born in Jordan.  Shalaby is a cultural icon and his paintings emerge with realism blended with history, culture and heritage of the Palestinian people over hundreds of years.

By touches with a brush abundant with colours projected on the canvas, the artist expresses the people’s infinite hope and eternal love for their land.  Through this artistic vista are seen the messengers under the moonlight of freedom struggling for dignity, saying:  “Uprooted from our homeland … we rooted the homeland in ourselves.”

Also featured in the exhibition are ceramics and textiles presented by Farah and Hanan Munayyer, the co-founders of the Palestinian Heritage Foundation — a cultural and educational organization aimed at promoting awareness and understanding of Arab and Palestinian culture and traditions.  The embroidered textile wall hangings are the modern interpretation of the ancient Palestinian art of embroidery, exemplified for centuries in the traditional Palestinian dress.  These textiles were embroidered by Palestinian women in refugee camps in Lebanon, whose workshops provide a meagre livelihood for many.

The ceramics are a popular Palestinian art form and were produced in the 1950s in Jerusalem.  Their decorations emanate from ancient motifs found on mosaics, wood carvings and brass engravings, from antiquity through medieval times to the present.

The International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People is observed in accordance with the provisions of General Assembly resolution 32/40 B of 2 December 1977.

For additional information, please contact Yosuke Kobayashi at the Division for Palestinian Rights, tel: (917) 367-7019.  For more information on United Nations exhibitions, call Jan Arnesen, tel: (212) 963-8531; or Liza Wichmann, tel: (212) 963-0089; and e-mail: arnesen@un.org, or wichmann@un.org.

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For information media • not an official record