Written by: Sandra S. Williams
assistant curator, LACMA Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Collaging Palestine’s past
By bringing the forgotten and marginalized to the fore, artists have the power to wrest the writing of history from the victors. Palestinian artist Hazem Harb is one such case. His photographic collages gather the fragments of Palestine’s pre-Nakba history and reformulate them into works that explore memory, power, and heritage, to question who gets to write history, in what manner, and for whom.
Show all
Written by: Sandra S. Williams,
assistant curator, LACMA Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Collaging Palestine’s past
By bringing the forgotten and marginalized to the fore, artists have the power to wrest the writing of history from the victors. Palestinian artist Hazem Harb is one such case. His photographic collages gather the fragments of Palestine’s pre-Nakba history and reformulate them into works that explore memory, power, and heritage, to question who gets to write history, in what manner, and for whom.
Harb, who was born in Gaza in 1980, trained in visual arts at IED Istituto Europeo di Design, Roma and stage at the Academy of Fine Arts of Rome, and considers himself a painter but has maintained a fascination with photography since childhood. Several years ago, he began to collect archival photographs of Palestine from the internet and private individuals, but only started incorporating them in his art in 2015. Harb creates collages by cutting and layering the photographs, compositing them with his own drawings, opaque paper, plexi-glass, and other found materials—his method of reclaiming and reworking history.
Among the series Harb made in 2015 was Archaeology of Occupation, where stark geometric shapes and concrete structures assert themselves over late 19th and early 20th century landscape photographs of Palestine. Portions of the bucolic scenes, once used to attract visitors to the Holy Land, are blocked and obliterated. The concrete forms, including security barriers and fragments of Brutalist architecture, tumble onto or else hover threateningly over towns and people. Harb’s photo-collages can be read to reflect the disjunctive landscape of present-day
Gaza and the West Bank, cut apart by politics and actual concrete. By creating elisions in the photographic records, Harb also points to gaps in historic narratives, particularly those written by hegemonic powers, where omissions and erasures facilitate a neat, sanitized state ideology.
Absence (of key details, of faces) and presence (of concrete security walls, of technology) suspend Harb’s collages outside of time, where we are never completely in the past or the present. In the TAG series (2015) Harb adds small square frames around people’s faces and on buildings in archival photographs, referring to the photo tagging feature found on Facebook. The squares suggest these people and places are identifiable but no names appear next to the boxes and instead they remain unknown. In their visibility, however, the loss of information seems to call for remedy and input. There is a suggestion that the data might one day be crowdsourced and filled in, the people tagged, known, and remembered, and that the present might salvage the past.
Harb returned to the participatory nature of history writing in his Power Does Not Defeat Memory series (2018). As with the Archaeology of Occupation, he again cuts and layers the photographs but here the colors and compositions are decisively more optimistic. He layers on brightly colored plexi-glass, tinting the audience’s view of the past so that they might see boats on the Sea of Galilee or a woman in traditional Palestinian dress in a literal new light.
The glass has the added effect of reflecting backthe viewer, making us a part of the composition and collapsing time. Through this self-referential tactic, Harb draws his audience into his practice of rewriting history and enlivening memory. Such animating of the past reappears, in a different manner, in his series Reformulated Archaeology(2018), where he collages and draws on images of ancient artifacts, giving them a biomorphic appearance. The implication is that like cells or viruses, the historic fragments have the potential to evolve. In both series, Harb conveys that the past is nota fixed entity but one that continues to grow, develop, evolve and rewrite.
Evolution is fundamental to Harb’s practice as an artist who works across several mediums. The geometric shapes that appear in paper and plexi- glass throughout his collages derive from his earlier paintings such as the al Baseera series in which he layered color and shapes in dynamic, Constructivist-like compositions. Harb’s multi-disciplinary practice allows him to select the medium that will best convey his concept and builds bridges between his various series. For example, in one image from theArchaeology of Occupation, a concrete barrier hovers just over the land,looking as though it is ready to settle down, poised to crush the mansitting in the field beneath it. While the man and barrier are suspendedin perpetual and dreadful tension in Harb’s collage, the full weight of the concrete is captured in his sculpture In Transit, in which three slabs of concrete are strapped to, and therefore, crushing a mattress. The horror foreshadowed in the collage manifests in the sculpture, each conceptually reinforcing the other.
By refashioning and recasting the physical photograph, Harb highlights the medium as a malleable and potentially faulty reminder of the past and, more broadly, the imperfect nature of memory itself. He questions the process of recording history by exposing the ways in which it can be manipulatedand encourages us to participate in its reworking by reflecting our imagesin his work. Through the many media he interweaves, Harb conveys thecomplexities of memory and longing that define the intractable state ofPalestinians without resorting to overwrought symbolism. In doing so, Harbopens the work up to deeper reflections on the very nature of remembering,power, and the politics of space.
Sandra S. Williams
2019
Show less
Written by: Lara Khaldi, curator
For The catalogue of "The Invisible Landscape and Concrete Futures"
Show all
Written by: Lara Khaldi, curator.
For The catalogue of "The Invisible Landscape and Concrete Futures"
Lara Khaldi, curator.
2015
Show less
Written by: Hazem Harb
Show all
Written by: Hazem Harb
Show less
Written by: Lina Lazaar
Curator
For most of the Arab world ‘concrete’ is still perceived as a material of growth and stability, yet in Gaza, it is instrumentalized into a weapon of segregation and suffocation. Vertical Gazan architecture is growing at such a pace that Palestinians are now recycling the concrete from their destroyed homes; reprocessing smashed histories to form a more ‘suitable’ narrative, shifting from pain to apathy, all the while reinforcing the haphazard concrete jungle of oppression. Hazem Harbs’ studio acts as a time capsule for Palestinian memory, a Pandora’s box of images, archives, and official documents suggesting an honorary representation of Gaza’s numbed and silenced memory. Mouaqat is a temporary research studio that offers a different historical perspective, one that is abstracting and reducing aesthetics in an attempt to raise questions of experience and memory, authenticity and authorship, and ultimately of how history can be narrated.
Show all
Written by: Lina Lazaar
Curator
For most of the Arab world ‘concrete’ is still perceived as a material of growth and stability, yet in Gaza, it is instrumentalized into a weapon of segregation and suffocation. Vertical Gazan architecture is growing at such a pace that Palestinians are now recycling the concrete from their destroyed homes; reprocessing smashed histories to form a more ‘suitable’ narrative, shifting from pain to apathy, all the while reinforcing the haphazard concrete jungle of oppression. Hazem Harbs’ studio acts as a time capsule for Palestinian memory, a Pandora’s box of images, archives, and official documents suggesting an honorary representation of Gaza’s numbed and silenced memory. Mouaqat is a temporary research studio that offers a different historical perspective, one that is abstracting and reducing aesthetics in an attempt to raise questions of experience and memory, authenticity and authorship, and ultimately of how history can be narrated.
In an environment where concrete is systematically poured to erase and neutralise history, Hazem’s photographic collages are transformed from their base aesthetic proposition and converted into historical documents, building a case for ‘contextual’ architecture; the subordination of urban space to its spatial, cultural, and economic setting. The scarcity of quality construction materials, combined with the uncertainty of planning, results in homes and shelters turning into self-built life-threatening structures, waiting to collapse, a comment on the general state of affairs, nonetheless.
Through its choice of ‘building materials’ Mouaqat further explores how architecture can physically manipulate a whole population into a state of near complete, desperate, dependency; a captive market for surplus Israeli consumer goods. Much like prison inmates that barter for access to menial goods that make their way into an otherwise highly controlled environment, the local Gaza populace is drip fed goods through a controlled system, a commercial opportunity of exploitation by its very oppressors. In the absence of any other dialogue, Mouaqat highlights the only regular ‘conversation’ that the oppressed and the oppressor maintain, one which leaves no imagination as to the balance of power.
If Mouaqat has a deliberate and obvious failing, it is the ability to, for a brief moment, experience Gaza without experiencing the impossible journey TO Gaza. The walk through the studio fails to convey the strenuous difficulty of crossing a seemingly short 33km distance from Rafah to Gaza, a border closed arbitrarily, stranding travelers for hours and often days, suspending them by the belief that gates do open up. ‘Time en route to Gaza, is reduced to infinity, it is totally devoid of meaning’ as Hazem suggests, highlighting that no one goes through more trouble returning home than the Palestinian Gazans. If Mouaqat manages to ease one part of your visit to Gaza, your role as keeper of your time and destiny, is it. Instead, you are confronted with a quick visit to the world’s most densely populated, poorly constructed, and heavily seized city, one that is propped up only by the spirit of its unyielding people, who populate the city with wedding after wedding, home celebration after home celebration, street sport after street sport, making the absolute most of this multipurpose city prison.
Lina Lazaar
2018
Show less
Show all
2014
Show less
Al Baseera,Hazem Harb’s first solo exhibition in Saudi Arabia, presents a significant body of work completed over the last eighteen months. The three dimensional paintings are the artist’s first interpretation of Islamic geometric patterns. Squares, rectangles and combination of shapes are mounted in multiple layers over the base canvas or painted directly in bright acrylic colors. Harb’s exceptional gift for utilizing color to evoke a sense of loss and turmoil, as in many examples of previous works such as Invisibility,takes on a profound introspective turn, a personal spiritual meditation on color and form.
Show all
Al Baseera,Hazem Harb’s first solo exhibition in Saudi Arabia, presents a significant body of work completed over the last eighteen months. The three dimensional paintings are the artist’s first interpretation of Islamic geometric patterns. Squares, rectangles and combination of shapes are mounted in multiple layers over the base canvas or painted directly in bright acrylic colors. Harb’s exceptional gift for utilizing color to evoke a sense of loss and turmoil, as in many examples of previous works such as Invisibility,takes on a profound introspective turn, a personal spiritual meditation on color and form.
The title of this seriesAl Baseerais derived from the Arabic word ‘basar’ which means looking as well as seeing through something whether an object, an event or an idea. In this exhibition, Harb’s invites the viewer to look deeply and reflectively, to admire ‘art for arts sake’ to immerse oneself in the series of paintings that celebrate the aesthetics of geometry. Here, there are no overarching themes of suffering. In contrast to works that explore human conditions of loss and oppression, in Al Baseera,the visitor transcends the present to engage in a contemplative Sufi interpretation of geometrical abstraction.
In several pieces Harb reverts to his ongoing exploration of vertical shapes, which in this series take a less somber presence than in the work I can Imagine You Without Your Home(2012) where they reference walls that separate and isolate. In Al Baseerathe column shapes are topped with geometric designs and superimposed with a series of horizontal and diagonal lines either in white or in blue suggestive of Sol LeWitt’sinfluence on Harb’s work. As if he intentionally disguised them.
Within the span of one month (April 2014) Hazem Harb’s work was presented at Durham’s University Orientalist Museums, at Dubai Art Fair “Live Art Window” where he painted a four meter long mural in a public space at Jumeirah Beach Residence and at FotoFest 2014 in Houston. All three exhibitions epitomize Harb’s determination to excel, to question and to create new experiences through his art. His oeuvre grounded in the human condition leaves us pondering the cruelty of man, the futility of war, the consequences of apartheid and the cruelty of isolation in refugee camps of migrants in Europe or the people of Gaza living as refugees in their own country.
Since Harb left Gaza in 2004 his art was influenced by his loss and by being forced to live away from his home. In the last five years, he has worked incessantly producing a large body of works that ranges from video art, to photography, paintings and sculpture, his work focused on this separation. According to Harb, Al Baseerah “… is a journey to challenge myself to take seek a deeper understanding of Islamic art and its dialogue with abstraction.” The outcome is this outstanding exhibition that offers a rich visual experience.
Salwa Mikdadi
Art Historian
Abu Dhabi, April 2014
Show less