ABSTRACT
Artworks—perhaps especially paintings—like memories, are sometimes cast to the back of the mind, like the back wall of a room, where they might serve as a context of sorts, or go out of focus and become effectively invisible, though they remain there and can be brought back into focus if conditions are right. An immigrant to England in the late 1980s, Makhoul’s art has always also been about the fate of Palestine in its relationship to and partial subsumption within the state of Israel. This dislocation is personal but also political, intellectual, and artistic. But implications of Makhoul’s own distance and dislocation from Palestine— both its historical reality and imaginary past and future existences—are notable in terms of the complexity and ambiguities of his most compelling works. Far from being ‘agitprop’ pieces, or even forms of analytic intervention (though they are often also that), Makhoul’s art is deeply interested in beauty and the possibilities of ‘aesthetic autonomy’ in artistic form.
