Sacred Dissonance is a series of glass collages that confront the fractured perceptions of the Holy Land, the tension between how it is mythologized in the West and how it is lived, destroyed, and remembered by those to whom it belongs. In this work, the body becomes both architectural and territorial:the body of the land, the body of the people, fragmented and contested.

Each collage overlays Western paintings of the Holy Land, images that, while often beautiful, romanticize and erase indigenous presence, with moments, spaces, and memories drawn from personal history. The chosen sites, Nazareth, Jerusalem, and Bethlehem, are considered sacred not through imposed mythologies but through lived experience: the intimacy of memory, the inheritance of loss, and the persistence of belonging.

These works unsettle the image of Palestine as a distant abstraction, exposing the contradictions between the Western imaginary and the realities of Palestinian life. The sacred, here, is not fixed in relics or ruins but embedded in daily gestures, fragile spaces, and enduring bodies that refuse erasure. Foregrounded among these images are scenes of domestic life forced upon freedom fighters sheltering in the Church of the Nativity during the Second Intifada; a personal photograph of Srouji as an infant, gasping for breath as her parents, wearing gas masks, remove her from a malfunctioning “baby defense device” during the Gulf War in Nazareth; and her grandmother’s shrine of the Virgin Mary, nestled in the garden of her family home in Nazareth.