For this group exhibition, Galerie du Jour agnès b. is partnering with the MAAN for Gaza Artists collective. The MAAN Collective (“Together”) was founded in October 2023 following the exhibition What Palestine Brings to the World at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris.

After a roundtable hosted at La Fab. in June 2025 and the commitment of the agnès b. endowment fund alongside the initiatives led by MAAN, this collaboration now takes the form of an exhibition. It continues a sustained commitment to artistic creation as a space for reflection, memory, and projection, In the context that Gaza is going through, which 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 the future.

The Grain of Our Hearts brings together works by 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). Working across photography, video, drawing, printmaking, collage, and installation, their practices unfold visual languages attentive to gestures, traces, objects, and stories that shape our lives. From one work to another, the exhibition weaves sensitive correspondences around essential questions: How do we inhabit the world? How do we carry a history? How do we transmit it?

The artists explore the persistence of images, the fragility of places, the memory embedded in objects, and the invisible ties between beings. Maps, keys, landscapes, archival fragments, and everyday gestures become forms of poetic resistance—ways of holding together what has been, what is, and what remains possible.

The title, borrowed from poet Donia Al-Amal, evokes what endures at the deepest level: an irreducible core of sensitivity, memory, and desire. Like a shared heartbeat, it connects these works without reducing them, leaving space for their differences in language, generation, and perspective.

Through this exhibition, Galerie du Jour and the MAAN collective affirm a conviction close to their hearts: art is a space of connection, circulation, and attention. As agnès b. puts it: “I wanted to create a gallery to show what I love. They call it a gallery, but it could also be called a place to reveal the underside and the alongside of things.” The works on display fully embody this philosophy, revealing what endures, is passed on, and is shared—often far from immediate images.

All proceeds from the exhibition will be given to the participating artists as well as to the MAAN collective.

* Title of a poem by Donia Al-Amal, Palestinian researcher and writer currently in France as part of the PAUSE program, under the aegis of the Inalco Foundation.