Yasmin Sharabi's artistic practice explores memory, inheritance, and grief through drawings in charcoal, pencil, graphite and more recently, assemblage. From her mother's side, South Dakota, she draws old photographs that she has inherited, of people who have passed, and of the ruins and remains of buildings and places. The work honors the dead, holding what is fading.
From her father's side, of Palestine, she draws land, bodies in motion, and the immediate, current gestures of grief. Here, loss is active: land being taken, people displaced, permanence denied.
Two very different image worlds that combined carry a sense of conflict. But through her own grief, loss, and sorrow, Yasmin finds the common ground between them.
Both carry the weight of human loss. Both ask: how do we hold onto what is being taken away? The South Dakota works lean into erasure, soft, fading, emerging and receding like memory. The images of Palestine hold onto land, movement, and the body, refusing to let what is loved be erased by death or occupation. Together, they explore how love and sorrow exist in the same moment.
Yasmin has learned that leaning into what causes us anguish, accepting loss rather than fighting it, can lead to transformation. Grief does not have to disappear. It does not have to fade. It can be held, honored and recognized for its beauty. In bringing these two sides together, she creates not resolution, but recognition: loss is loss, love is love, and both deserve to be witnessed.
Her drawings are an honest testimony, a cathartic act of truth-telling that restores and reshapes personal and collective histories. They are acts of resilience, devotion, and creation, transforming pain into meaning, honoring what once was.