Radiography of Aleppo 1 & 2

Location: ICD Brookfield Place, Al Mustaqbal Street, DIFC Dubai, United Arab Emirates

About the work

The built environment regularly informs Hazem Harb’s compositions. The artist moves beyond aesthetics and form to consider architecture as the trace of the society that established it. Architecture then has the potential to be evidence of a community or an apparatus of dominance invested with colonial and political agendas. In this case, Harb reflects upon the ancient city of Aleppo. Through collage, the artist constructs a discourse that did not previously exist while the imposition of archival photographs into the composition summons the past to the present.

Radiography of Aleppo #1, 2021, and Radiography of Aleppo #2, 2021

UV Fine art imposing print on acrylic sheets

100 x 150 cm

About the Artist

Palestinian visual artist Hazem Harb’s trajectory, spanning several decades, maintains an unwavering dialogue with his symbolically charged homeland.

Moving from Gaza to Rome and then on to the UAE, Harb has learned to navigate life as a liminal. Knowing that Palestine can never be just a ‘land’, the artist unleashes an ever- evolving repertoire of artistic techniques to negotiate a space which has been carved up and re-drawn many times. His art is at once subsumed in deep locality, fuelled by personal insight, and entangled in conversations that cannot be easily separated from the global arena.

His practice is intended more as visual excavation than romanticisation of the Other, and through it, we can explore the paradoxical and pressured relations between people and places. Steering away from nostalgia and the fetishisation of displacement and war, he negotiates a constructed axis of complex social and cultural relations: built and pastoral environments, modernist Bauhaus concrete and Jerusalem’s Old City walls, longing and belonging.

Much like the artists of the early twentieth century who, through the deployment of collage, healed from the trauma of the first world war by binding together everyday and artistic experiences; Harb succeeds in materialising complex and unfamiliar terrain. Operating as a researcher, by collecting and synthesising archives of rarified ephemera including photographs, negatives and maps, Harb mediates his materials in a manner which dismantles them from a static space. Through collage he stitches them together to form fresh constructions that invite unheard discourses and a historical rethinking. Learn more at hazemharb.com.