Contemporary artist
Ismail Matar
Ismail Matar (b. 1998) is a Palestinian multidisciplinary contemporary artist based in Brussels. His practice moves across calligraphy, painting, mural work, installation, and sculpture — a visual language rooted in lived experience and collective memory, shaped by symbols of resilience, continuity, and hope.
Born and raised in Gaza, his earliest encounters with art emerged in public space, where the walls of refugee camps became his first surface for expression. This formative relationship with the street and the wall continues to inform his approach to art as something lived, shared, and inseparable from everyday life.
His practice has developed into a sustained exploration of letters as moving forms rather than fixed signs. Through calligraphy, he approaches language as a spatial and physical act, where rhythm, tension, and flow transform writing into visual experience. In his work, letters become bodies carrying memory, loss, persistence, and traces of collective presence.
Project
Once again where we go
“When people are forced to leave their land, they do not merely leave a place behind; they also lose a part of themselves, a sense of belonging.” At the heart of the In Flanders Fields Museum, the Palestinian artist Ismail Matar presents large mirrored letters, mounted on a vast steel surface. For Matar, letters are not fixed signs but symbolic bodies that carry traces of loss, resilience and memory. They appear to move, yet remain rooted in a place they call home. Around the sculpture, voices, breaths, testimonies and whispers resonate, responding to the rhythm of the visitor. Fragments of the sculpture also appear in the city centre of Ypres. Shaped by rain, wind and time, the work is in constant transformation. With this installation, the artist explores displacement as one of the most profound and recurring human experiences throughout history: from the upheaval of the First World War to the devastation in Gaza.
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