Mohammed AlHaj محمد الحاج

Mohammed Alhaj | محمد الحاج

Lives and works in Gaza.

Mohammed Alhaj is a Palestinian artist working in painting, relief sculpture, drawing, printmaking and mural work. He was born in 1982 in Tripoli, Libya, into a family made refugees in 1948 from Kawkaba, a village in the Gaza sub district of Mandatory Palestine, who took shelter in Nuseirat camp. He came to Palestine at thirteen, in about 1995, and built his life and his studio in Gaza City.
He earned a BA in Art Education from Al Aqsa University in Gaza in 2004, alongside intensive study in drawing and sculpture. He has taught art in a Gaza secondary school and lectured at Gaza universities, and between 2005 and 2008 he co founded the Palestinian Society of Visual Artists in Central Gaza. He is a member of the Palette contemporary art group, and has spent two decades teaching younger artists alongside his own practice.
Alhaj builds surfaces that can be read with the hands. Across canvas, paper and wood he cuts and raises relief, layers mixed media, and works in black and white graphics, colour, collage, printmaking and engraving, moving between realism, expressionism, abstraction and pop. His subject has been constant: the relationship between a people and a land, and what happens to that relationship across generations of displacement. The keffiyeh recurs, with Arabic calligraphy, Palestinian folk ornament, women in procession, the camp, Jerusalem, the olive branch and the cactus, sabr, whose name carries patience. A bare chested figure appears again and again, dressed only in a keffiyeh and jeans, what he has called the typical Palestinian in bare resistance.
Two works show how he thinks. In Kawkaba Village (2014) he mapped the village his family was expelled from in 1948, a place he has never seen, working from his father's memory of its contours. In Gaza Evacuation Map (2025) he mapped displacement as he was living through it. The map is his form for land that cannot be stood on.
His solo exhibitions include Palestinian Features (Gaza City, 2007), Black Entity in White Space (Gaza City, 2013), Pages from the Homeland (Amman, 2015), Lam Tazul (Bethlehem, Nazareth, Jerusalem and Ramallah, 2018 to 2019) and Transition (Gaza City, 2021). Barred from travelling to his own touring exhibition in 2018, he sent the paintings by post and never stood in the room with them. His work has since been shown at Palazzo Mora in Venice in 2022, 2024 and 2026, at P21 Gallery in London, at the Museum of the Palestinian People in Washington DC, and across the pavilions of the Gaza Biennale. In October 2025 the Palestine Museum US presented his Gaza Evacuation Map in Washington DC.
In 2024 his studio in Gaza City, behind al Shifa Hospital, was destroyed, and with it roughly twenty years of accumulated work. Among the losses was the mural The Truth Is With You and The Land Is With Them, which was shown in Venice later that year as a printed copy because the original had burned. Displaced within Gaza by the genocide, Alhaj continued to work with what he had at hand: notebooks, pencils and black ink pens. That is the origin of Diary of a Palestinian Displaced Person, an ongoing record of what he sees. Since then he has made the mural project Abu Al Kuffiyeh, the ten painting Gaza Evacuation Map, supported by the Sahab Museum, and the ongoing series Transitory Gestures. He received a Transformations grant from the A. M. Qattan Foundation in 2025, and has kept teaching throughout, running printing workshops in the displacement areas of Nuseirat, Deir al Balah and Khan Younis.
Of the work itself he is direct: "Investing in art is no less important than resistance activity and political action. The Palestinian people's struggle is a just cause that deserves to be supported. I believe that art is a means to narrate the Palestinian story: we don't need someone to translate our art to the world, the common denominator among people is the visual language, which is easy to read and understand."