Maen Hammad

Who are you as a human being outside of the art you do? Walk us through your daily habits?

It’s difficult to speak about my daily habits or interests in any normative sense. Since the beginning of the Israeli regime’s genocidal assault on Gaza—and its escalation into the occupied West Bank—life has shifted. Everything feels marked by this moment. The consequences of Zionist settler-colonial domination are not abstract; they dictate the tempo of daily life.

What remains steady is my commitment to work that challenges the systems and racist logic facilitating this violence. Outside of photography, I support arms embargo campaigns, research Big Tech’s complicity in streamlining genocide, and contribute to corporate divestment work. I also spend time each week in Helhul with my grandmother as she tends to her land, a space that feels important and restorative.

How does your relationship to Land inspire your work?

There’s a tendency to romanticize the Palestinian relationship to land, to frame it as something purely spiritual or pastoral. But that flattens both the struggle and the people within it. Land is not metaphor. It’s not nostalgia. It’s what was stolen. The Nakba was not a metaphor—it was an ethnic cleansing campaign rooted in land theft and removal.

So yes, land appears in my work, but not always as a subject. Sometimes it’s the architecture of fragmentation. Sometimes it’s the terrain of surveillance. Sometimes it’s what cannot be seen in the image, but structures everything around it.

I moved back to Palestine at 21 after growing up in white suburbia. That “partial return” shaped the way I understand space.

There’s a constant tension between beauty and brutality here—how colonization reshapes the landscape and our collective memory. My family’s displacement is inscribed into our daily lives. I’m a third-generation refugee.

My father’s WiFi password, license plate, and daughter’s name are all the name of the village his family was expelled from in 1948. It’s not abstract, it’s baked in.

As a photographer, I feel a responsibility not to reproduce the visual tropes that make land sentimental or safe. The question isn’t just how to represent land, but how to refuse the erasure embedded in its occupation. I want to show what Zionist domination does to land, but also how Palestinians continue to live, build, fight, and remain—beyond binaries, beyond symbolic expectations, always toward liberation.

What role does movement—literal and metaphorical—play in your storytelling?

My relationship to photography began through movement. I learned to photograph while skateboarding as a teenager, outside, with skaters, at skateparks or street spots. That visual vocabulary shaped everything for me. **But more than form, I’m drawn to movement as a form of refusal: a way of pushing against the Israeli settler-colonial fantasy that Palestinians can only be fragmented, immobilized, or erased.

Movement exposes the cracks in that logic. Palestinians slip through the apartheid wall. They gather in the thousands to welcome home political prisoners whom the regime hoped would be killed in a cage.** Palestinians younger than me use every available tool of resistance, carrying forward a long lineage of armed struggle. They move, respond, and remain agile, holding fast to the fundamentals of our cause. The work follows that motion.

Skateboarding is a recurring motif in your work—what makes it such a powerful metaphor or tool for resistance?

Skateboarding shows up in my work, but not because it’s some perfect metaphor for resistance. I’m wary of how quickly people try to flatten Palestinian practices into symbols of hope or resilience, especially when framed through a Western liberal gaze. Skateboarding isn’t going to free Palestine. It’s not a nonviolent antidote to colonial violence. That framing betrays the complexity of what it actually offers.

For the small number of Palestinian skaters who practice it, skateboarding is a way to breathe. A way to move. A way to live outside, build community, and carve space in a landscape structured to suffocate us. It’s a craft, a practice, a form of self-making under siege. It’s not resistance because it looks cool or appears defiant; it’s resistance because it insists on life and imagination where the regime wants stillness, separation, and disappearance.