Ayed Arafah is a contemporary visual artist. Born in Jerusalem in 1983, Arafah grew up and lives in Dhesheh refugee camp in Bethlehem. He graduated from the International Art Academy in Palestine in 2010 and received the A.M Qattan Foundation Young Artist Award for his work Bog-Jet Bahar / Sea Package.

His installation Horizon, which expresses longing for the sea, was exhibited in the Mosaic Rooms Gallery in London in 2010. He was a resident artist at Città dell’arte in Biella, Italy (2013) as well as a participant of the “See You in The Hague” art project in the Netherlands (2014). Arafah’s work has been showcased in several venues across Europe and the Middle East, including Oslo’s Khio University, Hydrarcy in Cairo, Art Wave Ramallah, Brighton University, and the “Truth is Concrete” program in Graz, Austria. He lives and works in Dhesheh refugee camp.

Of his two-piece work, “Dehesheh: My Memory,” Arafah says,

“These two paintings are part of a work in progress entitled Dehesheh: My Memory. I portray the camp’s social and physical landscape through my recollection of a place that embodies so many beautiful and sad memories. The landscape and its spontaneous architecture speak of a human experience and of lives so full of richness, complexity, and paradox. The greatest of these is the dance between the feeling of belonging to the place where one grew up and the insistence of the right to one-day return to one’s ancestral home.”