For this group exhibition, the Galerie du Jour agnès b. is partnering with the MAAN for Gaza Artists collective. The Collectif MAAN (« Ensemble ») was founded in October 2023, following the exhibition Ce que la Palestine apporte au monde at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris.
Following a round table hosted at La Fab. in June 2025 and the commitment of the agnès b. endowment fund alongside MAAN’s initiatives, this collaboration now takes the form of an exhibition. It continues a sustained support for artistic creation as a space for thought, memory, and projection, in the context currently unfolding in Gaza—one that profoundly affects lives, places, and narratives. Supporting artists means enabling them to pursue work that connects the intimate and the collective, the present and—also—prepares the future.
The Grain of Our Hearts brings together the works of three generations of artists: Taysir Batniji (1966), Maisara Baroud (1976), Rehaf Al-Batniji (1990), Amer Nasser (1991), Samaa Abu Allaban (2000) and Adel Al-Taweel (1995). Their practices in photography, video, drawing, printmaking, collage and installation unfold visual writings attentive to gestures, traces, objects and narratives that shape our lives. From one work to the next, the exhibition weaves sensitive correspondences around essential questions: how do we inhabit the world? how do we carry a story? how do we transmit?
The artists explore the persistence of images, the fragility of places, the memory of objects, the invisible ties between beings. Maps, keys, landscapes, fragments of archives or everyday gestures become forms of poetic resistance—ways of holding together what was, what is, and what remains possible.
The title, borrowed from the poet Donia Al-Amal, evokes what endures at the deepest level : an irreducible share of sensitivity, memory and desire. Like a common heartbeat, it connects these works without reducing them, leaving room for their differences in languages, generations and perspectives.
Through this exhibition, the Galerie du Jour and the MAAN collective affirm a conviction they hold dear: art is a place of relation, circulation and attention. As agnès b. puts it: “I wanted to create a gallery to show what I love. People say ‘a gallery,’ but we could also say a place to show the reverse side of things—and what lies beside them.”
The works presented fully align with this idea, making visible what persists, is passed on and is shared—often far from the immediate images.
Proceeds from the exhibition will be donated to the participating artists as well as to the MAAN collective.
* Title of a poem by Donia Al-Amal, a Palestinian researcher and writer currently in France through the PAUSE program, under the auspices of the Inalco Foundation.
Samaa Abu Allaban • Adel Al-Taweel Rehaf Al-Batniji • Amer Nasser Taysir Batniji • Maisara Baroud
Collectif MAAN (« Ensemble ») : The Grain of Our Hearts
27 March – 15 May 2026
Galerie du Jour agnès b.
6-10 Place Jean-Michel Basquiat
75013 Paris
https://la-fab.com/la-galerie/
