Alaa Albaba

Alaa Albaba is a Palestinian visual artist, muralist, and community artist whose work explores displacement, refugee identity, memory, architecture, and everyday life. Working primarily with acrylic on canvas and large-scale murals, he combines surrealist and expressionist elements to transform familiar spaces and experiences into reflections on belonging, loss, and collective memory. His recurring imagery, particularly the fish motif, draws on his family's history of displacement and connection to the sea, while his murals and community-based projects engage with the social and physical environments in which people live.

Born in Jerusalem in 1984, Albaba studied at the Visual Arts Forum in Ramallah from 2008 to 2010 before continuing his studies at the International Academy of Art Palestine, where he graduated in 2015. His practice is deeply informed by his family's displacement during the 1948 Nakba and by his close connection to Al-Amari Refugee Camp, where he established his studio in 2011. Through projects such as The Fish Path, an 18-mural project spanning Palestine, Lebanon, and Jordan, The Camp, an ongoing series inspired by Al-Amari Refugee Camp, Kitchens, which explores domestic spaces and everyday life, and On the Wall (Almarsam), Albaba examines how memory, displacement, and community become embedded in the spaces people inhabit. He has participated in exhibitions, residencies, and collaborative mural projects in Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Norway, the Netherlands, and other countries.