Laila Shawa

In 2012, to go alongside the AKA Peace Exhibition at the ICA, Art Below showcased selected works from the AKA Peace series on the London Underground including artwork by Shawa. "AKA Peace", originally conceived by photographer Bran Symondson and now curated by artist Jake Chapman, is an exhibition of new works made specially for the Peace One Day Project 2012, bringing together a group of contemporary artists, all of whom agreed to transform a decommissioned AK-47 assault rifle, refashioning it into artworks. For Shawa, this was no foreign object, but rather a quite common one in the West Bank. At the AKA Peace Exhibition, while standing next to her piece, she said, "I'm very familiar with AK-47s so for me it was not a very strange feeling to carry the gun, but my first question to Bran was 'how many people did this gun kill?'" Shawa entitled her glamored rifle, Where Souls Dwell, a powerful name attached to an intensely charged piece of art. It is decorated with "rhinestones and butterflies and with the barrel sprayed gold." This is only one example of the artwork by Shawa, but bears light into the pain each work displays.

Her most well-known work in the 21st century is 2010's Walls of Gaza III, Fashionista Terorrista, which is a screen print originating from Shawa's photographs. The photo shows garments, a scarf and a sweater, which symbolize the Palestinian resistance decorated with a Swarovski crystal New York patch to visualize how the people of the west use the Arab struggle as a fashion statement. In 2012 at London's October Gallery, Shawa's show "The Other Side of paradise” opened, about which she stated:

The painting, Hands of Fatima, was created by Shawa in 1992. The height of the painting is eighty-nine centimeters high, and the width is seventy centimeters long. The museum number of this piece is 1992,0414,0.1, and is currently, not on display. It is positioned in a vertical composition. Shawa emolyed oil and acrylics on canvas. The background of the painting is dark with a yellow moon crescent, but it is paralleled with bright and vibrant colors of women in niqabs with unique patterns in each. Their eyes filled in black, and there are open hands that have the sign of the evil eye, and have painted henna designs. The painting is considered to have been executed in a Middle East and North African Modern Art style.

Shawa's first show outside of the Middle East, Women and Magic, was in London in 1992. She did not begin to find international acclaim until 1994, when she collaborated with Mona Hatoum and Balqees Fakhro in a show titled Forces of Change: Artists of the Arab World at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC.

In 1965, after finishing her schooling, Shawa returned to Gaza and directed arts and crafts classes in several refugee camps. She then continued to teach an art class for a year with UNESCO's education program. She then moved to Beirut, Lebanon in 1967 for a total of nine years and was a full-time painter. After the Lebanese Civil War began, she returned to Gaza and with assistance from both her father and husband, Shawa founded the Rashad Shawa Cultural Centre. Unfortunately, the center is not currently being used for what it was intended, as a cultural connection to Gaza through exhibitions and galas.

Laila Shawa (4 April 1940 – 24 October 2022) was a Palestinian visual artist whose work has been described as a personal reflection concerning the politics of her country, particularly highlighting perceived injustices and persecution. She was one of the most prominent and prolific artists of the Arabic revolutionary contemporary art scene.

Laila Shawa was born in Gaza on 4 April 1940, eight years prior to the Palestinian Nakba and the founding of the State of Israel. Shawa was well educated; she attended boarding school at the Leonardo da Vinci Art Institute in Cairo from 1957 to 1958, then went to the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome from 1958 to 1964, while also studying during the summers at the School of Seeing in Salzburg, Austria.