Maria Saleh Mahameed moves across the floor, as if in a trance. Holding a stick of charcoal in each hand, she sits on a large white cloth and marks it, black lines appearing as organic mirror images. Her fingers are stained from handling the charcoal; they percuss the canvas, leaving behind fingerprints and gestures. Mahameed’s bare feet dance and do the same.

“She disconnects. She gets into a zone and does her thing,” explains Anat Danon Sivan, curator and head of prints and drawings at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, where Mahameed’s solo exhibition Peace of Mind (Raḥat al-Rūḥ in Arabic) recently opened. “She never makes preparatory sketches. Everything is projected immediately; she has an image in her head and it just comes out.”

What comes out comes as a surprise. Mahameed doesn’t see her whole composition until she rises from the floor and looks at it from a bird’s eye view. “Seeing things from above, I think that’s also her stance. To be part of it and also not,” adds Sivan.

And to outsiders, Mahameed’s works defy definition. They’re like action paintings since we see traces of her movement, but she doesn’t use paint or colour or implements such as paintbrushes. They look like drawings but are on monumental unstretched cloth, not paper. There’s also a performative element to how Mahameed works, but viewers don’t see that when the works hang on gallery walls. And visually, her drawings look ancient and modern all at once—easily compared with either prehistoric cave drawings or contemporary artists such as Ana Mendieta and William Kentridge.

Like her works, Mahameed’s identity isn’t neatly defined either. The daughter of a Ukrainian mother and an Arab father from the town of Umm al-Fahm in Israel, where she grew up, she draws on the traditions of both her motherland and fatherland. Her use of charcoal ties her to Umm al-Fahm (‘mother of coal’ in Arabic); sheaves of wheat are a recurring motif in her work and connect to her Ukrainian family.

A selection of Mahameed’s mysterious works, all recently created in her studio in the Ein Mahil, a Palestinian Israeli town in northern Israel, are now on view in Peace of Mind. The title references the quest for peace within an existential struggle (a nod to the regional war during which all but one of these works were created) and follows the artist being awarded the 2023 Rappaport Prize for a Young Promising Israeli Artist—which includes a grant and solo exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

Mahameed received the Rappaport Prize in May, months before the events and aftermath of October 7, 2023. Her work on this career-shifting show, over the course of the ensuing war and frequent rocket attacks impacting her area, involved logistical and emotional challenges. Sivan said, “She asks, ‘What do you do in this situation? How do you create art during a war?’”. He noted her questions, “Can you, do you have the strength to act and what is your role as an artist? There were a lot of questions around that and a lot of difficulty. It wasn’t easy for any of us.”

Mahameed worked intensely in the six months leading up to the show’s opening, as she could only begin creating works once she knew which gallery it would appear in and the dimensions of the walls. Mahameed’s exhibition is site-specific in that her supports were cut to fit the walls they’d be nailed to and she knew in advance where she intended to place each artwork. Often working in triptych or diptych formats, groupings of her work fill the galleries and end in a short film produced by the museum for the exhibition, showing Mahameed at work in her studio. We see her handling her canvases and the choreography of her body in tandem with her materials, adding another dimension to how we see her works.

In this exhibition, she has experimented with stitching and with new materials, including polypropylene bulk bags and shrouds. Shrouds hold an association with death as the burial sheets used in both Jewish and Muslim traditions and just as Mahameed leaves her mark on these fabrics, a corpse leaves an imprint on a shroud. The first time she used shrouds, she inserted them as white flags in a triptych titled The Truth will Hurt the Path (2025)—a work inspired by Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830). Her flags are not triumphant, though, instead evoking flags of surrender.

A shroud is the support for another work, Confessions on the Altar of Life (2025), in which a resigned woman sits at the epicentre of prickly cactuses, surveillance cameras, a horse and weapons. The woman is Mahameed herself.

“She has an index, a symbolic language in which you see her self-portrait identified by a figure with long hair, like a horse’s mane, horses and birds,” explains Sivan. “These images repeat in all her works.” The horses are a reference to the artist’s fear, following a childhood incident in which a horse reared up over her. Birds are the opposite—something lifting us upwards. The long-haired woman, the horse and the bird are all stand-ins for Mahameed.

Mahameed, in general, is inseparable from her work. Her fingerprints coat her canvases. She paints with her feet. The thin swaths of cloth that she uses, almost a second skin, are big enough to contain her body. Since Mahameed’s works can encircle her, they’re life-sized for viewers who might also imagine entering the scenes she’s conjured. Like her, we are part of it and also not. We can permeate her monochromatic world of horses and birds and then retreat. For a few moments, we are in an enigmatic place – of peace of mind.

‘Maria Saleh Mahameed: Peace of Mind’ is on view until October 18, 2025, at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.