Artist Amer Al-Shomli

Amer Al-Shomli

Palestinian artist born in Kuwait in 1981.

He graduated from Birzeit University in 2003 with a major in architecture. He later obtained a master’s degree in fine arts specializing in animation from Britain. He has many artworks that utilize animations, caricatures, and stickers to interact with the daily Palestinian political and social environment. He is the founder of the animation diploma program at Birzeit University.

He has collections in the British Museum, the Museum of (Tools Returning Absence) in Kuwait, the Birzeit University Museum in Palestine, and the Abdul Mohsin Al-Qattan Foundation in Palestine. In addition to the private collections of several owners.

And in the year 2015, his painting “Pixeled Intifada”, which is a drawing of a cow from the movie, participated in the Palestinian Corner in the “Christie’s” auction in Dubai, and sold for more than forty thousand dollars.

In 2014, Shomali made the animated documentary (The Most Wanted 18). The film tells the story of the efforts made by the residents of the Palestinian town of Beit Sahour to establish an independent dairy farm during the first intifada. It premiered at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival. The film was awarded the Best Documentary Film Award at the Abu Dhabi, Carthage, Traverse City and Al Jazeera Film Festivals. It was also nominated for the 88th Academy Awards in the categories of Documentary and Foreign Language Films. The film also won the Michael Moore Award in the United States, which helped to set up a series of shows in New York and other American cities.

In 2012, he made an innovative mosaic portrait, consisting of 3,500 pieces of lipstick in 14 different colors in an art exhibition organized at Birzeit University as a tribute to the Palestinian activist Leila Khaled, as he took it from the famous image of the activist carrying a Kalashnikov and wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh.

In 2006, he was one of 13 Palestinian directors who contributed excerpts collected into one movie called (summer 2006). This film shows viewers a glimpse of Palestinian society.

In 2009, he produced his artwork (Visit Palestine Poster), which is a satirical artwork for the Visit Palestine poster designed by the Israeli artist Franz Krause in 1936 which aims to encourage Zionists to immigrate to Palestine. The artist Amer Shomali revised the poster with a new design that shows only part of the Dome of the Rock due to the apartheid wall covering the entire view. This poster highlighted the restrictions imposed by the occupation on the Palestinian people’s freedom to move and visit Palestinian holy sites in Jerusalem. The work was displayed in the British Museum in 2009 and later in the Palestine Museum in 2019.