In November 2025, Ab-Anbar Gallery in London presented A Cosmogram of Holy Views, an evocative exhibition by Palestinian artist and architect Dima Srouji. Through a constellation of materials, memories and craft, Srouji reassembled fragments of her homeland, challenging distortions of the “Holy Land” and reclaiming the sacred as a lived experience rooted in land, ritual and inherited resilience.
Reframing the Holy Land
For generations, Western imagination has framed Palestine as an abstracted biblical landscape, detached from the people who inhabit it. Srouji’s exhibition confronted these mythologies, redirecting attention toward what “holy” means for Palestinians who have endured decades of violence, erasure and displacement.
Her archival and sensorial approach reintroduced a material truth long overshadowed by romanticised projections, offering a counter-history built from memory, body and earth.
Glass as Witness: Sacred Dissonance
The exhibition opened with Sacred Dissonance (2025), a series of layered glass collages. Industrial glass panels printed with religious imagery were set against hand-blown glass fragments containing photographs from Srouji’s family archive.
Some of these images revealed moments of daily survival—such as her parents wearing gas masks—while another depicted a dried-out dam exposing the remains of cars once seized during military operations. These pairings exposed the tension between imagined holiness and lived reality.
Architecture of Memory: Model of a Sacred Home
In the next room stood Model of a Sacred Home (2025), a sectional reconstruction of her grandparents’ house in Nazareth crafted in the mother-of-pearl technique traditionally used in Bethlehem’s church models. By applying devotional craftsmanship to a family home, Srouji elevated ordinary domesticity into a site of reverence—holy not by doctrine, but by memory.
Echoes of Ritual: Anointed Shrines
The surrounding walls held the Anointed Shrines (2025), shimmering sculptural niches inspired by those in her grandmother’s home where candles were once lit. These works also recalled the empty recesses of ancient Palestinian churches whose relics were removed and dispersed abroad. Into these niches, Srouji placed limestone vessels tied to purification rituals—symbols of endurance that outlast displacement.
Spaces for Mourning: Phantom Votives
Perhaps the exhibition’s most arresting moment came with Phantom Votives (2025). In a darkened chamber, beeswax casts of severed hands and feet hung above dim candles while church bells echoed gently. Drawing from the overwhelming imagery seen across global screens, the work mourned the innocent lives lost in the ongoing devastation in Gaza.
This installation transformed traditional votive offerings—symbols of hope—into memorials for those who will never return.
Reinscribing What Endures
Across all rooms, Srouji foregrounded materials—stone, glass, mother-of-pearl, beeswax—as vessels of memory. Her cosmogram reinstated indigenous knowledge systems long threatened by colonial violence, reaffirming them as sacred and unbroken.
As the exhibition concluded on 29 November 2025, it left a lasting imprint: a testament to persistence, remembrance and the enduring sanctity of Palestine.
