Publisher's Synopsis
'Someone had to move the sabbar, the cactus, to a flowerpot.' This is how Anton Shammas opens his preface to this book, and this is the task that Asim Abu Shaqra has carried out over and over again in his paintings, in a kind of obsession arrested only by his untimely death at the age of 28. Throughout the course of his life, the artist was haunted by a sense of foreignnes and not belonging, as manifested by his infatuation with the sabra, which were actually self-portraits tethered into Palestinian iconography. This publication offers new interpretations on Asim Abu Shaqra's paintings.
