Palestinian artist Sliman Mansour has died at the age of 79. He was one of the leading figures in contemporary Palestinian art. He helped create a visual language of Palestinian identity, revisiting the land, exile and occupation in works that frequently featured olive trees and traditional embroidery. He was born in Birzeit, near Ramallah, in 1947 and attended Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem in 1970. In 1994, he co-founded Al-Wasiti Art Center in East Jerusalem to preserve Palestinian art and connect artists living in Palestine with other Palestinians in exile. This is Mansour in an interview with Al Jazeera in 2021.

Sliman Mansour: “I believe art in our situation, where — when you don’t have a homeland, when you don’t have, I mean, a country, a political thing, and when people deny your existence — you know, in Israel and many, many places in the West, they deny your existence — so, art is a form of saying that we are here.”