Rayan Yasmineh's suitcase is at the heart of his personal history mixed with that of the Palestinian people. This wooden suitcase, which dates from and bears the scars of the massive exodus of the 1948 Nakba, activates the ever-vivid memory of exile. The artist reminds us of the violence and heartbreak that this episode arouses in him, through the permeability of materials: when the motif of the knight reproduced on the torn wallpaper applied to the wall appears through the pierced suitcase without a (lost) key, and the paintings Garden Fragment 1 and 2 compensate through the shimmer of their colors for a happiness that is difficult to (re)find and to defend.

Precise and generous with details in his compositions close to the miniature, Rayan Yasmineh paints meticulous portraits of close friends or of himself, dressed as languid and princely pashas. By replaying the scene of the nineteenth-century Odalisque in the Orientalist profusion of his imagination and decorative tastes, the painter combines Persian history and iconography with contemporary Western identity, both in its sources and in its actuality.