Texts : Hazem Harb

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.

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Written by: Sandra S. Williams,
assistant curator, LACMA Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Collaging Palestine’s past

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

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The looming threat of a mattress

Written by: Lara Khaldi, curator

For The catalogue of "The Invisible Landscape and Concrete Futures"

When I was invited to curate Hazem Harb’s Solo show at Salsali Museum in Dubai, it was late July, and the war on Gaza had been going on for several weeks. I was in Berlin and Hazem was in Dubai, we met periodically, and it was with this background – or perhaps the foreground – of the war on Gaza that I got the chance to know more about Hazem and his practice.

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Written by: Lara Khaldi, curator.

For The catalogue of "The Invisible Landscape and Concrete Futures"

It was a difficult time for everyone, I could see and sense from across digital screens that Hazem’s disquiet was paralyzing. Of course I was very much in the same state, I had been in Berlin for a residency and was suffering the same paralysis, because against the catastrophe all else disappears, and the impetus to make work and produce becomes senseless. The only possible reaction would be madness. We talked mostly of the day’s news; I asked about his family, our conversations were interrupted with phone calls from Gaza and news headlines. Hazem spoke mostly of his childhood there, as theShuja'iyya neighborhood where he had grown up was being bombed into ashes. He told me a most hilarious story; he said that when he was about eleven years old he saw an archaeological dig in Gaza, which triggered endless questions addressed at his teachers and parents about archaeology. After some thought he decided to make figurines out of mud, dig a hole near his house, burry them there and wait for them to be discovered by archaeologists. This is not at all an attempt at saying Hazem was born an artist, as I do not believe in such things, but this is to try to describe Hazem’s story telling, and a mischievousness that also shows in his work. As, he repeatedly finds ways to subvert and intervene into grand historical narratives.

I asked him about his university student years, he told me that he started taking art classes at a young age at the YMCA in Gaza. After he graduated from high school he attempted to study at the ‘archaic’ fine arts department of Al Najah University in Nablus, Palestine. Hazem fled back to Gaza after a few weeks into the first semester, ‘it was boring, it wasn’t what I imagined a fine arts programme would be, and I was too young, it was the first time I had left home and lived alone.’ After a few years he was granted a scholarship to study at the Istituto Europeo di Design in Rome, where the city was an open air Museum of classical art, and where he learned more about the renaissance. He stayed in Italy and obtained an MFA from the Academy de belle arti de Roma, where he was given a studio and material for production over two years, and according to Hazem ‘I locked myself up in the studio and painted night and day’.

Hazem then moved in with another artist from Gaza, Mohammad Joha into a house and a studio in the North of Italy, which he has kept and now lives between here, Dubai and the North of Italy. When I visited him in his studio in Dubai it was in pristine shape, he is organized and minimal, his studio is fairly small, but moves in all directions of the house, and so it expands and shrinks according to project.

I have to admit that I am not very well acquainted with Hazem’s Paintings, because I focused for his upcoming solo show on his practice over the past four to five years, which had been steering in the direction of drawing, collage, video, sculpture and installation. But now that I look back from the vantage point of his three-dimensional work onto his paintings, I can see the thematic and formal threads. I did ask him why he stopped painting, he said he hadn’t stopped painting, and that he was never ‘only painting’ he insisted that the form of the work was informed by what the work was. I insinuated whether it might actually be the current availability of resources that also enabled him to start working with sculpture and installation and he did admit that when resources had been scarce he worked with painting sometimes, as a register for what might have been an installation or a sculpture.

The recurrent mattress

Over the past four years one can trace a recurring image in Hazem’s work. In I Can Imagine You Without Your Home, 2012 one can trace a bed in almost all the images from the project. A light box shows an image of what looks like a destroyed house. The photograph is from the perspective of someone standing outside a bedroom and trying to take a peek into the room, the bed is in the background, the hallway is destroyed and in the corner there is a light installation in the shape of a moon, but inside the image and not outside. The rest of the body of work show photographs of mattresses and bedrooms with black ink invading and clouding the photographs. When I asked Hazem about the photos, he said that he took them when he went back to Gaza after the 2009 war and went around taking the photos of bedrooms of houses all over Gaza. One is unaware of the location of the bedrooms in any way from the photos themselves; there aren’t any references to the city or the context, unless the onlooker is aware that the artist is from Gaza. The juxtaposition in the light box of a bedroom and excessive light through both the light emanating from the light box and the fabricated moon creates a tension, especially among the photographs around it engulfed in black ink. They produce a suspended threat that could infect our sleep at any moment. The frailty of the mattress reminds one of the fragility of sleep, when one surrenders under the weight of a closing day to the safety of slumber. It is when one is most vulnerable; the mattress is witness to this vulnerability. When I asked Hazem about why he didn’t show the photos as they were, without his intervention, he said: ‘I did not want to objectify nor exhibit the spaces of intimacy of the people who’s homes I photographed, nor did I want it to be documentary’. I could not help but think of Godard’s famous saying about the Israelis always using fiction while Palestinians ended up with the documentary. I think that Hazem belongs to a generation of Palestinian artists in the region that do challenge this, and who understand that the media has subjected the Palestinian people to their narratives, while the Israelis have been able to knit their own historical narrative. Hazem shows the mattress in the exhibition I Can Imagine you Without your Home in several ways, as in addition to the light box and the photographs there is also an installation of thin mattresses rolled and hung from the ceiling of the exhibition hall over the audiences’ heads. The mattress here changes from a susceptible object and becomes a looming threat that hovers above our heads, that could also connote, slumber when it comes to our political positions. I would also like to add that the trope of the bed in art history (from Titian’s The Venus of Urbino, 1538 to Manet’s Olympia, 1863 and after) is usually of a nude reclining on it, it is the usual background of depicting a model, an erotic and intimate image which especially during the 19^thcentury was one that shocked people and made them uncomfortable.

Hazem continues to use the mattress in his work, he shows me images of the sculpture titled In Transit, which was commissioned by Galleria Continua, Le Moulins in 2013. Three slabs of concrete varying in thickness and size and two wooden doors are strapped tightly on top of a pink bed mattress. The mattress lies underneath the crushing weight. The work is quite monumental in size, and again exerts a tension even stronger than in I Can See you Without Your Home, the stark difference between the material of the concrete and the mattress and the binding of the two together aggressively connotes a sleep that could transform into a death. But it also points at a number of questions that surface through the work and that revolve around the question of architecture and infrastructure, a question about what holds and binds everything and everyone together. This is also made more clear in the work 'Re-build', from 2012 which is made out of a piece of a thin striped sponge mattress, it looks as if it has been used and re-used again and again. Its corners are cut out, making it look like an architectural plan, a basic floor plan for a house perhaps. A cement brick is laid out in one of the corners sideways making it look almost like a bed. It depicts the intimacy between architectural ruins, the body and violence. The cement brick denotes infrastructure, or rather the building material of interior walls and facades: infrastructural elements in our utmost private and daily lives, which supposedly gives shelter, support and protection that is of course until they collapse. The binding together of such material with the frailty of the mattress is fraught with the binding together of the human and the architectural. The flimsy mattress invokes sleep, perhaps an eternal sleep induced by the slab-like brick signaling human traces. Hazem foregrounds the alienating feeling of our utmost homely and intimate surroundings turning into nightmarish life threatening structures, where architecture becomes the crushing weight of violence against our bodies. Hazem disrupts our trust in architecture and infrastructure. He strips bare both the brick, usually hidden behind painted walls, and the thinness of the mattress, which is usually cushioned in layers and cloth, revealing an architecture of vulnerability. Which brings us to Hazem’s solo exhibition at Salsali Museum in March as he has been looking more deeply into questions about architecture in relation to colonialism and oppression. Hazem has been developing a series of collage where one sees chunks of concrete suspended in the air over archival images of Palestine pre 1948. Dark masses of geometric shapes hover over the cities ominously, as if they were alien shapes leaving or landing onto the landscape. While Hazem and I have been conversing over the past months, there have been many questions about the images of destruction in Palestine, how to represent them, whether to represent them? How through material and form of the sculpture or installation does one challenge certain icons of an oppressive architecture such as the concrete, which is the flesh of the wall of apartheid and city of Tel Aviv? Or how the Israelis use different strategies other than destruction to convert the landscape? As Hazem has been preoccupied with a museum in Jerusalem called, Museum on the Seam, which was a Palestinian house up until 1948 when the Israeli military confiscated and used it as a military outpost, until the 70s when it was used as a museum intermittently. For the exhibition Hazem is building a platform in the form of the floor plan of the museum, and on the platform will be displaying a number of small sculptures and a video that include the tropes of sleep, perhaps suggesting another context for sleep in relation to architecture where sleep becomes a sign of transformation and potential, subverting the power of the museum by suggesting that it is only dormant, but will one day wake up to a different future.

Hazem insisted on giving me a ride back to my hotel, and just as he was leaving the street where he lived, right in front of us we see a huge grey slab hovering and interrupting the horizon. It was very surreal to have seen the collage just minutes away at his studio and to come out to that scene. It turns out it is the backside of the Emirates mall sky slope. I asked Hazem whether he sees the stark similarity; he replied laughingly that he just has. We enter another discussion about how his work is always read only in relation with Gaza and Palestine, as that is indeed where he sees the world from, but that is not necessarily only what his work is about. The questions that Hazem asks through his work, and the positions he takes are not bound only to Palestine, they pose questions about power, hierarchy, oppression, and history, which are questions that should be posed everywhere.

Lara Khaldi, curator.

2015

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In Transit

Written by: Hazem Harb

The sculpture In Transit, which was commissioned by Galleria Continua in 2013.

Three slabs of concrete in varying thickness and size and two wooden doors are tightly strapped on top of a mattress that lies underneath the crushing weight. The work is monumental and again exerts a tension stronger than that in I Can See You Without Your Home.

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Written by: Hazem Harb

The sculpture In Transit, which was commissioned by Galleria Continua in 2013.

But it also points to a number of questions that tackle architecture and infrastructure, about what holds and binds everything and everyone together. This notion is also made clear in Re-build from 2012, comprised of a piece from a thin striped sponge mattress, which looks like it has been used and re-used. Its corners are cut out, making it look like an architectural plan – perhaps a basic floor plan for a house. A cement brick is laid out sideways in one of the corners, making it almost look like a bed. It depicts the intimacy between architectural ruins, the body and violence. The cement brick denotes infrastructure, or rather the building material of interior walls and facades: infrastructural elements in our private and daily lives, which supposedly offer shelter, support and protection – until of course, they collapse. The binding of such material with the frailty of the mattress is fraught with the binding of the human and the architectural.

Hazem Harb

2013

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Mouaqat -Temporary مؤقت (Open Studio)

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.

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Written by: Lina Lazaar
Curator

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

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Hazem Harb, Shades of Existence

Written by: Verena Hein

Curator, Villa stuck museum, Munich

Shadows of the past and the present appear in the conceptual works of Hazem Harb (b. 1980). Drop shadows lend corporeality to putatively two-dimensional canvases and wall pieces are completed by their own cast shadows. “Shade is life, is a sign of thre movement and existence.”[1]Harb stays close to this existence, to reality. Using various techniques, he explores subjects of historical and sociological dimensions in multi-part series of works. Thus Harb questions traumatic experiences that shape societies through war and loss in archival works such as Beyond Memories (2012). He adapts found images, arranges them into collages and incorporates color fields that carry meaning. In his TAG Series(2015) lines zero in on the faces of people to wrest them from oblivion. The works of Harb presented in Common Groundsframe possible modes of perception and the experience of delimiting forms in a multilayered and poetic fashion.

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Written by: Verena Hein

Curator, Villa stuck museum, Munich

Shadows of the past and the present appear in the conceptual works of Hazem Harb (b. 1980). Drop shadows lend corporeality to putatively two-dimensional canvases and wall pieces are completed by their own cast shadows. “Shade is life, is a sign of thre movement and existence.”[1]Harb stays close to this existence, to reality. Using various techniques, he explores subjects of historical and sociological dimensions in multi-part series of works. Thus Harb questions traumatic experiences that shape societies through war and loss in archival works such as Beyond Memories (2012). He adapts found images, arranges them into collages and incorporates color fields that carry meaning. In his TAG Series (2015) lines zero in on the faces of people to wrest them from oblivion. The works of Harb presented in Common Groundsframe possible modes of perception and the experience of delimiting forms in a multilayered and poetic fashion.

His extensive series Al Baseera ( 2012–) operates within this thematic framework. The large-scale paintings deal with geometric forms of Islamic origin. Starting out from the Arabic word “bazaar,” which combines the dual meanings of “seeing” and “seeing through something,” he questions these viewing habits and angles. For one thing, the painting’s support—i.e., the canvas itself—becomes the object of his scrutiny. The unframed basic canvas is combined with other canvases of different formats to create a three-dimensional object whose corporeality becomes subtly perceptible. For another thing, Harb interprets the geometric motifs by confronting these basic forms with one another in intense yet seemingly harmonious colorfulness. Demarcating lines and clashing color fields dominate, with black becoming increasingly important. The black areas and three-dimensionality turn the painting into a “sculptural image.”[2] It is the viewer who complements the work through his experiences—and who is forced to reconsider his or her personal viewing behavior and perspectives. For Harb this contemplative mode of perception is to be considered a transcendental experience. Still, it would be wrong to describe Harb’s art as reception-oriented; rather, he reveals his concept through the titles of his works. While the three works of the Al Baseeraseries subject the viewer’s standpoint—and, in terms of the exhibition concept, the awareness of art historical models—to close scrutiny, Harb’s sculptural work Till the End (2014) is about framing social borderline experiences.

Till the End (2014) combines six rectangular blocks into a wall piece. The shape of the individual blocks varies due to open and closed borders. Precise rhythmic shading from light grey to deep black is accompanied by changes in the basic form. Accordingly, the final block is a nearly closed cube with only the rear demarcation missing. This work is complemented by the shadows or non-shadows the borders cast on the wall due to the gallery lighting. Open spaces and demarcation become immediately palpable. The reference to Sol LeWitt (1928–2007), one of the leading exponents of Minimal Art, underscores Harb’s approach. In his seminal work Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes (1974) LeWitt shows 122 ways of configuring cubes as closed or open. In both cases the serial character highlights the artistic concept. Based on its title Till the End, Hazem Harb’s work implies a social dimension. Harb condenses his themes into simple geometric forms in order to question a complex social system. The use of shadows underscores this. According to C. G. Jung’s theory of archetypes the shadow is the complement to the conscious personality: it represents a person’s dark side—that which society rejects and which is hidden in our subconscious. The negative connotations of loss of freedom, of feeling surrounded by boundaries are definitely implied in the subtle shadows.

Verena Hein

2014

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البصيرة Al Baseera 2014

Written by: Salwa Mikdadi

Art Historian

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.

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Written by: Salwa Mikdadi

Art Historian

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

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