Born 1987 in Saudi Arabia, Majdal Nateel is a Palestinian visual artist and researcher who grew up in Gaza. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Fine Art from Al-Aqsa University in 2009 and is currently based in Sweden. She is co-founder of Dahaleez, a collective artistic practice exploring the spaces between cultures, bodies, and political realities.
Her artistic research has developed across many contexts. The main inspiration for her early artworks was lived experience — translating the reflections of individual cases on society, as in Memory's Salt (2011) and The Impact of Light and Glass (2013).
After 2014, her practice turned toward the value of humanity under political challenge — the repeated threat of war and the ongoing blockade of Gaza. If I Was Not There (2014) dedicated artistic tools to speaking on behalf of children who lost their voices and became victims of the bombs. Under the same context, she produced Without Coffins and The Dream is Possible — works that materialise the concept of return as an individual and collective dream that defines the Palestinian.
Between 2017–2019 she developed Lane — an imaginary corridor that helps overcome the feeling of being stuck between borders, unable to travel, shedding light on humanity neglected by politics in our small corner of the world.
In Studying the Voids of Amputation (2020–2021) she linked physical amputation and geographic amputation, producing a body of work on this theme. She was recently part of the "Decolonial and Noncanonical Learning in Gaza" programme with the Goethe Institute in Palestine, and completed a 16-month residency at Sommerakademie Paul Klee, hosted by the Bern Academy of the Arts HKB.
Majdal's work continues to focus on the impact of colonialism, occupation, and siege on the physical structure of human beings under these conditions.
