Inass Yassin’s multifaceted practice focuses on themes rooted in her personal experience. She examines modernity in the Arab mind through the disappearance of social and cultural networks, exploring this through photography, film and installation, and interrogating the material and immaterial causes of the dissipation of the Arab cultural renaissance. The transformation of spaces and urban gentrification in Ramallah and neighbouring cities such as Beirut and Amman have also been a focus. Yassin’s large-scale paintings, in acrylics and oils, are visceral and immediately felt.
Maria Thereza Alves’s research-based work unearths silenced histories from different localities. Her relational site-specific projects respond to the immediate physical and social environment and aim to create spaces of agency and visibility for the oppressed. She mostly focuses on interventions in land and empowers a language for organic growth in opposition to the regimented and controlled.
Rain Wu is an architect whose practice extends across art and design to include installation, drawing, curating, set and building design. Wu’s architectural training informs her artistic practice, and her collaborations with Eric Chen, a scholar and principal architect of ArchiBlur Lab, include projects that consider the connections between bodies and controlled landscapes, and how the organic functions within order. For the 2017 Sharjah Biennial 13, they produced Collectivism, an installation constructed out of 700 bulletproof shields.
Al-Mintar stands prominently as one of the most important commissioned works in the gardens of the Palestinian Museum. Recently completed by the Palestinian artist Sliman Mansour, it was commissioned in line with the Museum’s goal of nurturing our connection with the architectural heritage of Palestine. This work simulates the idea of reviving the construction of mintars, or what used to be described as ‘farm palaces’, scattered across the Palestinian countryside.
Archaeology of Occupation is a 2015 body of work by artist Hazem Harb. In this collage series, Harb juxtaposes pre-Nakba (1948) photographs of Palestinian landscapes with concrete heavy masses on the horizon of some of the images. Among many things, Harb has been experimenting with the relationship between sculpture and painting; collage as a technique seems to be very fitting, not only in terms of formal experimentation but as a reference to modernist works of art.
Laila Shawa's photographic canvases, from which the lithograph series is inspired, are a testimony to the walls of Gaza during the last phase of the First Intifada. The series Walls of Gaza expresses the intimacy of the place and the transformation of the built environment that changed on a daily basis during that period. The walls became the surface on which the directions were announced because, during the Intifada, normal time was suspended, and each day was structured around strikes, confrontations, and commemorations.
Athar Jaber’s figure sculptures, primarily produced in stone, focus on degradation, humiliation, violence, fragility, and questions of beauty. Born to Iraqi parents, his sculptures reflect on violence and war and their effects on real bodies. Raised in Florence, the artist questions, by creating deformed figures, the tradition of depicting perfection and beauty in marble statues. Jaber subjects his marble sculptures to carving, sandblasting, acid, and even shooting the faceless stone busts, limbs, and figures.
Bob Gramsma’s installations and sculptural interventions are concerned with finding spatiality in nature and the outdoors, often taking the form of monumental sculptures that are forms of holes excavated from the earth. His interventions are both coincidental and concise as he rearranges existing elements in nature or introduces foreign materials to a natural environment, searching for form. Facts on the ground, OI#17241 is a site-specific earthwork made from negative space. The artist has created a mound and then dug into it, only to fill it with concrete, making a cast of the cavity.