NASO x Zawyeh Gallery - On Abstraction: An Interview with Ruba
Presented alongside Refined Compositions, Zawyeh Gallery Dubai, 13 September - 9 November 2025.
Ruba is a visual artist based in Berlin. Her practice moves fluidly across painting, video, collage, and installation, with abstract painting at its core. “I work with geometry, color, and form to build compositions,” she explains. “Abstraction is the language I resonate with the most, as it offers a space where I can reconstruct and expand my own distinctive visual language, a kind of meeting point between my interior world and the universal.”
On Identity & Becoming an Artist
For Ruba, being a Palestinian artist is not simply a matter of identity, but of existence. “It’s not an identity I chose, it’s one I was born into,” she says. “It shapes the way I see, feel, experience the world I live in and the way I express myself. It means creating in a context where your existence is political, where your work becomes a form of testimony to life itself and sometimes a way of survival.”
Her journey toward art was not marked by a single turning point. “There wasn’t a moment when I suddenly realized I was an artist; rather, it has always been something I do organically. I think I was born with it,” she reflects. “Making art isn’t a choice for me—it’s just who I am, with all the existential struggle that comes with it.”
Sources of Inspiration
Ruba draws inspiration from both the everyday and the abstract. People, places, food, sounds, textiles, and texts find their way into her practice, alongside explorations of color, form, and their tensions. She has long been fascinated by modernist movements such as Russian Constructivism, De Stijl, and the Bauhaus. “There’s something timeless in those periods; I’m fascinated by both their aesthetics and the ideas behind them,” she notes.
While early in her practice she worked more figuratively, she has moved toward abstraction as a space of transformation “where all these components I carry with me—the psyche, the political, the constructed—manifest in my work and contribute to shaping the visual sensibility and the distinctive language I’ve been developing in the past years.”
On the Upcoming Exhibition
The forthcoming exhibition begins with the urgent provocation: How does one make art in the face of genocide? For Ruba, this was less a question than an atmosphere that permeated her entire process. “It hovered over every part of the process,” she explains. “Painting became a way to process grief without having to explain it… It was a refusal to go numb. A refusal to disappear. Seen in the abstract, it became an act of construction in the face of destruction.”
This sense of continuity deepened when she re-encountered the work of Kamal Boullata, particularly Homage to the Flag. She first saw his paintings in 2021, at an exhibition in Berlin. Two years later, his work returned to her unexpectedly during a period of paralysis and despair. “Revisiting Boullata felt like finding light inside a cave,” she recalls. “Painting is by nature a solitary practice—one that calls for solitude, attention, and a shifting inward and outward gaze between the self and the canvas. Yet, in the context of ongoing genocide, this solitude has grown heavier, more isolating. It is within this space that the work of Kamal Boullata enters, offering me a sense of connection and belonging to the larger Palestinian narrative. At a time when our existence as a people is under active erasure, painting takes on another dimension: it becomes more urgent, more responsive, and more firmly rooted in the collective.”
Boullata’s legacy reminds her that painting, even in its solitude, is part of a wider context—a shared history and struggle. “It pushes back against numbness, against erasure, and against despair. And within this realization lies a seed of hope.”
The Use of Color
Much of the new work adopts a reduced palette drawn from the Palestinian flag. For Ruba, this choice is as political as it is aesthetic. Many of the canvases were painted over, transformed into new works, a deliberate act of reclamation. She points to the history of Israeli authorities banning the Palestinian flag and even its colors after 1967: “Reusing this choice of reduction is more than an aesthetic decision—it is an act against continuous attempts of erasure, insisting on visibility, remembrance, solidarity, and an expression of constant grieving.”
The Presence of Ants
Ants also appear throughout the series, sometimes subtly, sometimes at the center. For Ruba, they embody resilience, community, and deep connection to the land. “Despite how easily they can be crushed, their fragility, they persist. They keep ecosystems alive. To me, that’s a powerful metaphor for survival in the face of erasure.” She also situates them within Palestinian farmer culture and in the symbolism of surrealism, where they suggest decay, anxiety, and death—echoing the surreal horror of present realities in Gaza.
What She Hopes Viewers Take Away
Ultimately, Ruba does not prescribe how viewers should interpret her paintings. “Abstraction isn’t meant to explain, it invites to feel,” she says. Once the work leaves her studio, it no longer belongs to her. She hopes only that viewers carry away an emotional resonance of their own—whether it is recognition, discomfort, or connection.
Refined Compositions will be on view at Zawyeh Gallery from the 13th of September to the 9th of November 2025. Zawyeh Gallery is located at Alserkal Avenue, Dubai.
