Zebra Copy Card

Khaled Hourani's paintings play a particular role within the wider sweep of his art works. Producing multimedia works that are situations or durational events that are collaborative in nature. Hourani draws on the skills of craftspeople or works with ad hoc groups of artists, curators and local citizens. Within this spectrum of media, this paintings offers an opportunity to record a personal gesture, reflecting human stories that reveal the context in which they are created.

The Zebra Copy Card, 2009, a painting that springs from the larger story of a Gaza zoo that found itself without any exotic display, highlights the surreal and adaptive strategies of Palestinians in straightened circumstances. The results were an enormous success but the incident says something more about the transformative capacity of imagination. Hourani's painting lightly pushes this further, enquiring into the potential for art to deceive, delight and confuse us with its powers of representation. To combat their problem, the son of the zoo owner transformed white donkeys into 'zebras', using masking tape and hair dye.

Amid the complicated situations of the Gaza zoo, the painted animals and the collaborative postcards, the painting hones in on Hourani's personal measure of the situation. Offering no resolutions or obvious comments on the larger situation, the painting is a more intimate physical response to the story.