If Palestine Were Free Tomorrow, I Know Exactly What I Would Draw First

Shireen Salman grew up inside her father's antiques shop. She didn't yet have the language for what it meant to be surrounded by things that outlast those who owned them.

That understanding came later, slowly, then all at once, when her father passed away and she found herself looking at everything he'd left behind in a new way.

Curious. Searching. Trying to understand what had always been there, but never fully explained.

“That’s when I started reading more, asking more questions,” she says. “Things started making sense in a different way.”

That’s when she started making art.

Drawing Jerusalem

Shireen is based in Jerusalem. She moves through the Old City with the attention of someone taking notes — the tiles, the architecture, the materials, the visual languages embedded in walls and objects across centuries. She studies them before she draws anything.

Her work isn’t reproduction. It’s reinterpretation. She takes what she finds — patterns worn into stone, geometry repeated in plaster, motifs that have survived every wave of erasure — and redraws them in her own hand. Not copies. Translations.

Translation not from language to language, but from memory to image. From what a place holds, to something a person can carry.

“I started to feel like I needed to make something that speaks about us,” she says. “Something that carries Palestinian culture in a way people can take with them.”

Creating from Jerusalem comes with an invisible weight. Shireen doesn’t describe it as one single restriction — more like a shifting boundary. Sometimes social. Sometimes emotional. Sometimes just a feeling she can’t quite name.

“There are things I don’t feel comfortable sharing publicly,” she says. “Sometimes you choose what to show and what to hold back.”

Even when her work isn’t political in intention, it gets read through a political lens. That tension is something she navigates constantly, quietly, carefully — without letting it stop her.

She continues anyway.

If Palestine Were Free Tomorrow

We asked her: if Palestine were free tomorrow, what would she draw first?

She paused. Not because she didn’t know, but because she did.

“The flag,” she said. “Alongside Jerusalem.”

A combination she’s avoided for a long time. Not because it means nothing, but because even in visual form, it carries restrictions. The flag isn’t absent from her work because she doesn’t feel it. It’s absent because she does.

That’s the kind of artist Shireen is. She knows exactly what she would draw. She’s just waiting for the moment she can.

Shireen’s postcard is one of four Palestinian makers in the Summer Palbox, each piece chosen for what it holds — and who made it.