In collaboration with the Faculty of Art, Music, and Design at Birzeit University

Saturday, March 2nd, 11:00  – 12:30

Location: The Palestinian Museum

Language: Arabic
 

In collaboration with the Faculty of Art, Music, and Design at Birzeit University, we will sit with the artist Tayseer Barakat at the Palestinian Museum for an artist talk about his exhibition The Disappeared currently hosted in the Glass Gallery. In this exhibition, Barakat creates a world that is built on loss in its broadest meaning; loss of life in its familiar intimacy, loss of the sense of time, loss of place, and above all, the loss of ourselves. The characters in Barakat’s artworks, who are portrayed within three groups: “Astray”; “Shades”; and “A World in the Making”, live in a world that is constructed upon ruins: marginalised characters watching from afar at times, wandering around at other times. Their faces are without expression, their eyes cannot see, and their movements are without rhythm. Barakat’s world is open to interpretations and multiple possibilities, a world we cannot accurately decipher; whether it is the world of the disappeared, or the world of the people who lost them, perhaps both. During a genocide, we all disappear. 
 

About Tayseer Barakat:

Barakat was born in Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza in 1959, and he completed his art education at Helwan University in Cairo. Following the completion of his studies, he moved to Ramallah, where he currently resides and teaches and creates art and is one of the most prominent Palestinian artists currently working. Barakat works with various mediums, experimenting with different materials such as wood, metal, and glass. Painting remains his first love, and he continues to work prolifically, drawing upon the artistic heritage of the region and its historical influences. His works have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in museums and cities around the world, including São Paulo Biennale (1997); The Number that Became a Name (Brazil 1996); Ramallah (2006); Distant Voices at Zawyeh Gallery; Ramallah (2014) In addition, he has held 10 solo exhibitions and has participated in numerous group exhibitions with many of his contemporaries in Japan, USA, Brazil, Europe and across the Arab world.  He is a founding member of Al Wasti Art Center in Jerusalem, Halaq Hall in Ramallah which has become the headquarters of the Palestinian Association of Contemporary Art (PACA), and the International Art Academy-Palestine.