Mattar’s grandparents were displaced from the 1948 Nakba – her father’s side from al-Jorah village and her mother’s from al-Batani al-Sharqi. Mattar herself grew up in Gaza.

Growing up, she attended UNRWA schools through ninth grade, primarily studying at a school in the al-Shati camp, among others. Mattar excelled in academia and eventually became ranked first among all the students in the Gaza Strip in the Tawjihi exams and second across all 30,000 Palestinian students.

While her favorite classes were those of math and languages. It was after her results on a science exam, however, that a key moment happened. As an award from her school, she received watercolor supplies – her first ever art materials.

Mattar would even draw the human body or cell structures for assignments. “I was passionate about perfecting the shapes, lines, and colors,” she said.” I worked hard and remember my teacher showing off my work to my classmates.”

It was the positive feedback and encouragement in school that made a big difference. “My teachers’ encouragement and compliments to my artwork marked a turning point in my life,” Mattar said. “They believed in me and made me feel special, smart, and talented. Then and till this present day I feel connected to them. My mom was an UNRWA English teacher, and she, of course, is one of my biggest fans.”

When Mattar was 14, the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) attack on Gaza in her life came during 2014.

This 2014 Gaza War, as Al Jazeera notes: “killed over 2,200 Palestinians – the vast majority among them civilians – and 71 Israelis, the majority of them soldiers. The war left Gaza in ruins with over 17,000 homes completely destroyed, and thousands of other buildings, including hospitals, schools and factories, destroyed or severely damaged.”

The article also notes, “There is a whole generation of Palestinians in Gaza that grew up knowing nothing but war and siege and have never seen the world beyond Gaza’s deadly borders.”

Mattar is one of those young Gazans. In a later interview, she said:

“I was surviving the third Israeli attack on my city for 52 days and I saw my neighbor getting killed and (her body) recovered from the rubble of her destroyed house.

I was very overwhelmed with feelings of fear, anxiety, lack of sleep and sense of safety.

I went into my room to find a way I can release my emotions and distract myself from thinking of being the next victim.”

It was at this point that Mattar found the watercolors she got from the science exam and started to experiment with them as an outlet.

“The experience of art was not new; I grew up watching my uncle paint and sculpt in his studio and I was fascinated by how a blank white canvas is turned into a piece of art that resonated with me and moved my feelings, and my uncle played a role in guiding me into art, as he is an art professor.”

Site note: Mattar’s uncle is Palestinian artist Mohammed Musallam. He works across various mediums (painting, photography, installation) and holds a Ph.D. in Art Philosophy. As a professor at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza, he led classes on drawing, painting, and the history of Palestinian art as part of the Faculty of Fine Arts.

Mattar lived in Turkey for around four years to get her Bachelors degree before being able to go back to Gaza, due to border closer issues. She was worried that if she went back home, she might not be able to leave again – which did happen to other students – and would therefore lose her scholarship.

So it wasn’t until March of 2021, after borders opened and classes were available online due the pandemic, that Mattar first came back home.

Two months later, there was another assault on Gaza by Israeli forces. This time it lasted 11 days, from May 10 to May 21.

Due to the intensity of the bombings, and the number of residential buildings demolished, this felt even more intense for Mattar than the previous three attacks she had survived.

On social media at this time, she also shared clips from her bedroom window of the sky, wish flashes of orange from the nonstop bombardment, as she was barely able to sleep.

When talking to The Palestine Pod about it a few months later in September of 2021, Mattar said, “It took me a while to physically walk, because the trauma of that attack caused intensities in the muscles.”

"When you are under constant bombing, and there is absolutely no guarantee of safety, it gives you a sense of helplessness,” Mattar said, feeling that even if her family was wiped out it wouldn’t make a difference. “It’s quite destructing to one’s self-esteem, you mean nothing… It makes me feel like life, my life, is not worthy.”

Mattar recognized the importance of the moment, viewing herself as a witness of history, sketching Gazan martyrs and writing journals of what happened. “What I see, other billions of people are not seeing. And my narratives of what I’m seeing is so important.”

After those May 2021 attacks, Mattar started to look at her work differently. "Peace is no longer a priority. If you see my art, I always draw doves and white birds and peace,” she said. “I said no, I don't want peace, I want freedom. Because there should never be peace when there's occupation." At that point, she decided not to paint doves anymore.

In February 2022, Mattar went to Italy to exhibit her work and have an extended visit, before going back to Turkey. In June, she graduated with her Bachelors degree.

In Spring 2023, Mattar had been accepted into the prestigious Central Saint Martins school at the University of the Arts London.

This was slated to start in September 2023 for the Fall semester. However, due to travel blocks from Israeli authorities, Mattar missed the first month of the course.

It wasn’t until October 6 that Mattar arrived.

The day after marked the start of a new chapter in Gaza, and all of Palestine after the decades-long occupation, with the ongoing genocide.

“I have no words to describe that day, and for what followed. I still find it hard to take myself back to that time,” Mattar told Al Jazeera about October 7.

“2014 is the war that we would all talk about. A 51-day lockdown. Death and destruction. But I could tell this was going to be worse,” Mattar said. “I just never thought it would become a genocide.”

Initially, Mattar felt a paralysis to make any art as she witnessed the Israeli attacks on her home town from afar.

However, at one point she started to do some gestural and more freeform sketches, in charcoal and pencil, of moments being shared from Gaza. In December, she did over 100 sketches in December on brown paper, featuring Palestinian martyrs from Gaza.

Soon, that would evolve to inform a new visual direction of her work.

When Mattar then took place in a ten-week artist residency with An Effort in London in early 2024, she continued to abandon the colorful approach of her past, only working on a greyscale.

In a profile in The Markaz Review, Nadine Nour el Din writes:

“For Mattar, color represented a sense of celebration, beauty and innocence even in the worst moments, perhaps most evident in her series entitled You and I, which she painted during her traumatic experience of the Israeli assault on Gaza in 2021.

Through this new body of work, however, a profound sense of grief informs her approach.

‘I relinquish my role of giving hope to people,’ Mattar explains.”

In the same profile, Mattar says the Gaza genocide could be seen as worse than the 1948 Nakba.

“Personally, I feel that this is worse. Maybe ‘48 was more traumatizing, but the scale, advanced military, documentation, and social media make this the most documented ethnic cleansing.”

This ultimately led to the creation of her largest canvas to date, No Words… (for Gaza), which she worked on over the course of a month, from January to February 2024.

It was stored in the vault of London's National Gallery and then exhibited at Cromwell Place in March 2024.

Mattar feels it helps summarize a lot of things she wanted to say about the genocide in Gaza. At the launch exhibit opening, she commented about the painting:

“It’s a documentation of the most barbaric and the most horrific genocide in our century.

When I painted this, it didn’t really start in 2023. It triggered so many memories of my life as a war survivor since the age of eight. So this painting really unfolds many of the memories I had as a child.

But let me say this painting is not a celebration. This exhibit is not a celebration. It’s a reminder that we have failed. We’re all a failure, humanity has failed.

This is not only my painting, it belongs to Gaza, to the people of Gaza. I hope it really disturbs you, I hope it haunts you forever… I hope you will never forget it. You’re all complicit, I’m sorry. The fact that you’re living a normal life, I’m so angry.”

The work features a panoramic compilation of genocidal atrocities in Gaza, referencing images and videos from family and friends and other stories of survivors.

Mattar decided to make art as an important way to capture and teach about this moment.

In a an interview with The Tricontinental, she said:

“If the painting is strong enough to evoke this deep emotion of injustice, this is how it generates solidarity because it moves you. And when it moves you, it makes you ask a question like, ‘Why is this be speaking to me?’ Because there is some context to it. And when you know the context, you then learn on your own and you pick a side…

And living (currently) in London, people are drawn to the visual art. For them, it's more interesting than in the newspaper. But painting is such a strong medium, and I've seen it throughout the shows, how people really have conversations over a piece of art that news reports will not evoke.”

While Mattar’s No Words is a compilation of multiple events over the course of October 2023 through February 2024, it follows a history of similar art that documents tragic events to Palestinians.

The painter Samia Halaby did a collection around the turn of the 20th century – Drawing the Kafr Qasem Massacre – based on interviews with survivors from the 1956 Kafr Qasem massacre.

“It’s just as I learned about the Nakba through the work of Sliman Mansour and Tamam Al Akhal,” Mattar said. “I could experience how the artists felt through their work, and I’m hoping my work will add the same value.”

Another similar example due to its panoramic shape and amount of detail is Iraqi artist Dia Azzawi’s painting of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila Massacre.

In addition to her London opening exhibition after the residency, the show has continued to travel.

One place where it was also on view was Venice, Italy, in a solo exhibition titled “The Horse Fell off the Poem” (April 16 - June 14, 2024) – named after a poem by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.

“(Darwish) is part of our individual and collective identity,” Mattar told Arab News about the exhibit title. “We grew up with his poems, his voice and his story. He was so close to us, like a family member. I still remember his death (in 2008) and it was really hard. His poems are timeless and you can always relate to them, especially now.” 

The dates also aligned with the Venice Biennale, minutes away from the exhibit, though not officially part of it.

Mattar was among nearly 25,000 artists and cultural workers who signed an open letter demanding Israel’s exclusion of the Biennale. Italy’s culture minister, Gennaro Sangiuliano, responded by saying, “Israel not only has the right to express its art, but it has the duty to bear witness to its people precisely at a time like this when it has been ruthlessly struck by merciless terrorists.”

“The Venice Art Biennale will always be a space of freedom, encounter and dialogue and not a space of censorship and intolerance,” Sangiuliano added.

That is, of course, unless you’re Palestinian. After all, the Palestine Museum US’ show “Foreigners in Their Homeland” was rejected for the 2024 Venice Biennale. The exhibit’s goal had been submitted with the aim “to shed light on the conditions that Palestinians suffer from, including living under an apartheid situation and checkpoints.”

Mattar has called out the anti-Palestinian racism in the art world, describing it as “one of the most prejudiced places.” In The Tricontinental interview, she said:

“I don't believe there's freedom of expression in the art world for so many people. It depends - if your ideas align with them, then you have all the freedom of expression. Otherwise, you will be canceled no matter how good your work is. But even writing the script on the exhibition was a fight. Having this painting is a fight.

But for me, the institutions and galleries, etc, it’s only a tool. And I'm not going to feel powerless if I am censored. In fact, it will empower me more. It will just mean it's a very powerful statement and that they cannot handle it.”

One of the biggest gallery museums in New York, for example, rejected it and said there’s no place for anti-Israel in the museum, Mattar said.

“I don't create for institutions. I create for my people. And this painting, the fact that it's written in Arabic, it's for us. I painted my people.

I didn't paint it for some Westerners to see - and for approval to welcome it in their spaces. My goal and my ambition one day is to have it exhibited in Gaza, the Museum of Gaza.”

Mattar’s masterpiece has traveled around the world during 2024. The traveling exhibit has often gone by Last Breath, the original name of the painting.

“The genocide is still happening. It’s not ending,” Mattar said, who also has made a point to honor artists who have been martyred during the genocide – such as Heba Zagout, Duniyana Al-Amour, Mohammed Sami, and Majd Arandas.

“These works are not a reflection of a time that already happened — it’s happening at the moment. The best time to show them is now.”