Mai Daas: Revelation

Mai Daas’s paintings are born from the female body and the domestic space. two charged, intimate, and political realms. Through emotionally rich figurative-realist painting, she creates scenes in which women gather in circles: kneeling, sitting, lying down, gazing at one another or closing their eyes together. These are gestures of closeness, of sisterhood, of a quiet yet persistent feminine movement. The circles she paints are not merely compositional structures, they express community and solidarity within a social reality that dictates repression, modesty, and control.

The domestic space, which recurs in her work as a constant reference, becomes a site of ritual and resistance. It serves as a symbolic realm where a feminine identity is formed, one that does not conform to societal norms, but seeks to reemerge from the body, memory, and voice. A central motif in her work is white flour, a mundane material loaded with multiple meanings. The flour washes over the figures, covers them, or is scattered around them. The whiteness, on one hand, symbolizes purity, silence, and protection, but at the same time also erasure, concealment, and social demands for imposed female modesty. The flour is not merely a material, it is a charged symbol that embodies the gap between the societal expectation of a “pure” female body and the living, acting, present body.

Alongside the white, red is another dominant color in Daas’s works: hinted at in fabrics, stains, and bodies, infusing the scenes with an energy of blood, pain, passion, and rage. The red in her paintings reminds us that the femininity she depicts is not only quiet or symbolic but also fierce, active, and alive. It marks the emergence of an inner truth that seeks to break through the layers of covering and concealment, into the open. Out of this tension, the exhibition Revelation | انبثاق is born, a moment of birth from the void, a quiet yet determined eruption, the appearance of voice, body, and light.

As the Moroccan sociologist and feminist Fatema Mernissi emphasized throughout her writings, patriarchal societies are often most threatened by women who possess a body, a voice, and a memory: elements that together challenge systems of control and erasure.

Daas’s paintings aim to give space to such a body: present, sensitive, wounded, defiantand allow it to emerge not as a victim, but as a force. This is art that seeks to reveal the action within stillness, the truth hidden between layers of paint, fabric, materials, and memory.

Her work explores the relationship between Palestinian female identity and societal expectations, personal memory, local visual traditions, and the politics of the body. Elements from Arab-Palestinian culture such as carpets, textiles, and veils, are interwoven with personal imagery and influences from Western art history. From this encounter, she creates a “third space,” as theorized by Homi K. Bhabha—a space where female identity can be born and shaped not through rigid definitions, but through fluid, free, and multi-voiced existence.

Revelation | انبثاق is an invitation to listen—to step inward into the feminine world that Mai Daas creates, where the home becomes a ritual center, and painting becomes a tool for observation and resistance, for birth and emergence.