TEL AVIV.- Hannan Abu-Hussein is the laureate of the Rappaport Prize for an established artist for 2023.

Maria Salah Mahameed is the laureate of the Rappaport Prize for a young promising artist for 2023.

Each artist who wins the award will contribute a work to the Ruth and Baruch Rappaport Collection of Israeli Art.

The value of the prizes to the winning artists is USD 140,000

The established artist prize includes USD 35,000 awarded to the artist herself and funding a solo exhibition at Tel Aviv Museum of Art, accompanied by a catalogue.

The young promising artist prize includes USD 15,000 awarded to the artist herself and funding for a solo exhibition at Tel Aviv Museum of Art, accompanied by a catalogue.

Funding of the exhibitions for the laureates will total USD 90,000.

Each winning artist will contribute a piece to the Ruth and Bruce Rappaport Collection of Israeli Art – the entire collection will be donated to Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

Hannan Abu-Hussein – Laureate of the Rapport Award for an Established Artist, 2023




Hannan Abu-Hussein was born in 1972 in Umm al-Fahm, and lives in Jerusalem. She completed a Bachelor's Degree in Art at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, and a Master's Degree in Art History at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. She presented solo exhibitions and participated in group exhibitions in Israel and around the world.

Hannan Abu-Hussein is an educator, she teaches at the Shenkar College and at the Kibbutz Seminary and leads artistic projects, the main of which is Arab-Jewish cooperation in East Jerusalem. Her educational work and her art reflect her struggle to change deep social and gender patterns.

Hannan Abu-Hussein's body of work is marked by multiplicity. Compared to the ethos of modernist reduction that prevails in local art, her work places congestion, excess and repetition, through which she articulates a distinct artistic and cultural position. In her large-scale installations, she makes use of a wide variety of materials and different types of media, including sculpture, painting, video, sound and performance. The syntactic freedom is essential to her dialogical creation, which raises burning questions concerning everyone whose multidimensional identity is subject to coercion, reduction and unification.

Abu-Hussein's work has been recognized with many awards, including the Becky Dekel Outstanding Artist Award from the Association for the Study of Women's Art and Gender in Israel (2019), the Minister of Culture and Sports Award in the Fields of Plastic Art (2014); the Teacher Artist Award (2011), Creativity Award from the Ministry of Culture and Sports (2010), Young Artist Award from the Ministry of Culture and Sports (2005), the America-Israel Cultural Foundation Award (1998; 2002), and the Heinrich Bell Award (2002).

Maria Saleh Mahameed, Laureate of the Rappaport Prize for a young promising artist, 2023

Maria Saleh Mahameed Habib-Allah was born in 1990 in Umm al-Fahm, and lives in Ein Mahal.

Graduated from Oranim Academic College. She presented solo exhibitions at Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Maya Gallery, Tel Aviv, the Artists' House, Jerusalem and the Umm El-Fahm Art Gallery.

The fabric stories woven in Maria Saleh Mahamid's work are not fiction, they are rooted in her personal life and the life of her family, and in long fabric scrolls spread out on the studio floor. Her monumental paintings wrap the walls of the exhibition space and echo a symbolic language, consisting of archetypal-ancient patterns such as the mother figure, and personal and cultural symbols such as horses, monitors and security cameras. Saleh Mahameed mostly draws with charcoal, an echo of her hometown Umm al-Fahm (Mother of Coal), and leaves on the surface traces of the action of the body on the canvas, the prints of her feet and palms. The drawing installations created from the beginning of her artistic career expand the boundaries of the drawing format, delineate a space of lingering, and allow viewers to assimilate into dream-like hybrid scenes, which at the same time constitute a sober testimony to a divided and complex political and social reality.

Maria Saleh Mahameed is the winner of the Beatrice Kolliner Award for a Young Israeli Artist from the Israel Museum (2021-22), the Excellence Award from Oranim College (2017), and the Hecht Foundation Award for Young Artists from the Hecht Museum, Haifa University (2015-16).

Jury of the Rapaport Art Prize Committee for 2023: Tania Coen-Uzzielli, Mira Lapidot, Dalit Matatyahu, Irith Rappaport, Rivka Saker, Drora Dominey and Adi Goldner