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Holy Almonds
Faten Abu Ali (b. 1990, Sakhnin)
Video & sound / 5:59 min / 2025

Navigating the interaction between past and present in the Holy City where Abu Ali resides, her work responds to Maroun Tomb’s A Street in Jerusalem. By documenting the grafting of a carob tree with an almond tree in the village of Ein Karem, Abu Ali investigates the relationship between environmental changes, cultural symbols, and agricultural practices. Traditionally, carob trees carry negative connotations and are thought to be possessed by jinns. In reference to resilience, carob trees also serve as the foundation for popular idioms around hardship, “Just like a carob fruit, cannot be bitten and cannot be chewed.” On the contrary, the fragile almond blossom inspires the cycle of renewable life that resists erasure.

Grafting has a dual functionality: attempting to integrate and impose an unnatural relationship between separate plants. The marginalized carob is grafted into an almond trunk that blossoms quickly but remains fragile to human and environmental changes. The work becomes a visual study in the hybrid nature that is imposed by political and social circumstances, whether on the environment or on the humans that live within it.

Where Ein Karem witnesses harsh demographic changes, grafting becomes a metaphor for the complicated relationship between the indigenous population and settlers, between what remained and what was forcefully changed. Will the carob grow inside the almond tree? Will this grafting become natural or will it remain tense and impossible?

Faten Abu Ali is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Jerusalem. She holds a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts from the University of Haifa, a teaching certificate from Beit Berl College, and is pursuing her MFA at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. Abu Ali’s work focuses on questions of space and distance, as well as social issues in the Arab community. As a multidisciplinary artist, her creative process is driven by material research, using everyday materials such as salt, rice, honey, house furniture and coffee. Abu Ali’s rich visual imagination stems from her significant life transitions between four cities: Sakhnin, Haifa, Jerusalem and Jaffa.