Walls are never just walls. We like to think of them as neutral — solid, dependable, doing their job quietly in the background. But that idea only works if you’ve never had to live against a wall, cross one, be stopped by one, or watch it slowly take over your field of vision.

For many Arab artists today, walls are anything but passive. They divide, shelter, conceal, protect — and fail at all of these things at once. They absorb pressure. They collect marks. They remember what people are forced to forget. In places shaped by displacement, migration, occupation, and constant movement, walls stop functioning as architecture and start behaving more like bodies: fragile, layered, vulnerable, exposed to time and damage.

The artists gathered here don’t treat walls as symbols from a distance. They work with them closely, almost physically — scraping, peeling, layering, staining. Sometimes the wall becomes skin. Sometimes it becomes an archive. Sometimes it turns into a threshold that can no longer hold its shape. What matters is not the wall as an object, but the surface as a site where lived experience leaves a trace.

Look at the works of Iranian artist Azin Zolfaghari — she paints walls with wounds and scars, as if they are not inert stone but living organisms capable of suffering.

This sensitivity to surface comes from a deeply personal place. Azin has lived for years with a chronic autoimmune condition (psoriasis), an experience that shapes the way she understands damage, exposure, and endurance. In her paintings, walls begin to behave like skin — layered, irritated, fragile, constantly marked by pressure and time. Paint is built up, scraped away, reworked: a slow, almost bodily process that mirrors cycles of injury and repair.

These are not images of collapse, but of persistence. The city appears as a body that keeps going despite its wounds, holding memory in every crack and abrasion. What might first look like decay becomes something closer to vulnerability — and through that vulnerability, a form of strength.

Homa Abdollahi is an Iranian multidisciplinary artist who, across diverse media, consistently returns to the idea of boundaries — physical, psychological, and social — and their inherent instability.

In her Coating series (2022), Abdollahi turns her attention to walls and ceilings — surfaces meant to shelter and contain, yet rarely questioned. Covered, layered, and subtly altered, these architectural planes begin to feel provisional, almost uncertain of their own role. What is usually taken for granted as stable infrastructure becomes something exposed and uneasy.

This sensitivity to space is shaped by Abdollahi’s own experience of constant movement and changing environments. Through repeated journeys and relocations, she has developed a sustained interest in the relationship between humans and their surroundings, and in the quiet, often fragile efforts involved in protecting them. Her surfaces often appear incomplete or in flux, as if caught mid-process. This instability reflects broader concerns in her practice about shelter, protection, and the conditions under which space becomes inhabitable — or stops being so.

Walls and ceilings no longer function as clear boundaries. Instead, they register pressure, weight, and quiet tension, revealing how easily structures designed to protect can begin to feel uncertain, temporary, or exposed.

Hazem Harb was born in Gaza and lives in exile. The walls he engages with are not abstract symbols or overt political images. They are places where time has settled, where everyday life has left its marks.

In the Peeling series, Harb doesn’t so much depict walls as work through them. Surfaces are fragmented and exposed: layers of paint, plaster, and paper are partially torn away, revealing what lies underneath. The colours feel faded and worn — dusty pinks, muted blues, earthy tones — as if they’ve absorbed years of living, shifting, and waiting. Nothing resolves into a complete image, but the sense of an interior lingers.

The act of peeling itself is slow and careful, not violent. It feels closer to uncovering than to destruction — a gesture that searches rather than breaks. Each removed layer hints at something that was once covered over, painted out, or pushed aside, yet never fully erased.

What emerges is never whole. Memory appears in fragments, stains, and interruptions. There is no final revelation here, only traces. And it’s precisely in this incompleteness that the work holds its tension — between what once existed and what can no longer be fully returned.