Dalia
Abdulrahman

 Dalia Abdalrahman, a Palestinian visual artist born in 1985 in Cairo, Egypt, started her education in schools of Egypt and went on to attend Palestinian schools in Gaza when her family came back to settle in. Dalia attended College of Fine Arts in Al-Aqsa University following her passion and dream of reaching out to the global community through her art. She completed her studies majoring in Art Education and obtained her first bachelor’s degree in 2006 with a cumulative grade average of 80.2%. She then returned to the same college to pursue another bachelor’s degree in Décor and Interior Design, which she completed in 2012 with a toal cumulative grade of 86.6%.At the same time Dalia was pursuing her second bachelor’s degree, she taught Arts in government-run schools for a year before she had to quit due to her intolerance for the routines of school environment. She has always believed that being a teacher extinguishes the flame of art and creativity inside her; especially when those schools are hardly equipped due to the general condition of Gaza Strip. She went on to become more available for her private art work. Since then she has taken part in several local and global exhibitions as well as various art workshop, such as, ones on visual arts, photography, expressive arts, film making and video art. That’s when she excelled in animation film making and spent four years working for private and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as a couch for animation film making.Dalia Abdalrahman has always focused her attention on women, their rights, their authenticity and, above all, the oppression manifested against them. She believes that women in her Palestinian community are weak, oppressed and own little rights. Therefore, most of her artwork had to do with her own reality being a Palestinian woman.In 2014, Dalia took the initiative of a revolution of colors as a reaction to all the massive destruction and violence Gaza Strip and Gazans had to witness and live through during the war in Summer 2014 by the Israeli forces. At that time, Gaza was left so full of destroyed houses and broken streets that the whole strip was immersed in the gray color, that depressing color that escalated depression and hopelessness, which people already suffered. Dalia’s initiative aimed to create a colorful theme of Gaza by painting the rocks of the Gaza seaport. The rock cement cubes were turned into children’s colorful cubes in the hope to resurrect life and spirit in Gaza.Dalia envisions a solution to everything with art and believes in the wonders of the universe. From this point of view and from her outlook on the limited women rights in the Palestinian society, she decided to found an atelier that will belong to female artists and name it Gaza Atilier.