’Marks of Return ’’When a wall holds memory, is it still only a boundary, or has it become witness and archive?Walls are never neutral. They divide and enclose, but they also absorb, accumulate, and remember. They become surfaces where silence is broken, where resistance takes form, and where memory refuses erasure.In ‘’Marks ofReturn’’, Salma Dib positions the wall as a living surface of resistance. Her works emerge from the raw, layered language of street walls,urgent, provisional, and defiant in the face of disappearance. In Palestine, walls are not inert structures; they have become unavoidable canvases, inscribed with acts of testimony that transform stone and concrete into collective archives of defiance. Against the violence of enclosure, silencing, and the ongoing genocide of a people, every inscription is both shield and amplification: protecting the individual while carrying forward a shared voice.Dib translates this charged vocabulary into layered compositions that resist seamless narratives. Scraped, overlapped, and interrupted, her surfaces echo the f ragmentary and unstable accumulation of resistance. In their incompleteness, they mirror the precariousness of memory itself,always vulnerable to erasure, yet insistent in its reappearance. In her new body of work, this is most powerfully seen in a monumental piece composed of 25 smaller works, layered together as a single whole.At once f ragmented and unified, it becomes both symbol and archive: a meditation on resistance, the passage of time, and the collective act of holding memory together.At a time when Palestine endures relentless assault, Dib underscores the wall as more than a structure of separation. It is a living archive, an active participant in the struggle for existence, dignity, and collective memory. Her paintings hold space for voices that refuse silence, affirming the wall as a site where resilience is inscribed, and where belonging and liberation continue to be written, again and again.Through this language, Dib transforms the wall from mute material into a participant in history: not a static object, but a witness, a register, and a reminder that what remains are not just marks and fragments, but the persistence of a people, and a future that refuses disappearance.Essay Written by: Shilan SamaeiDirector