Literature

In the Paradise Lost series Gaza-born visual artist Hazem Harb assembles fleeting glimpses into the material and natural landscape of his homeland from which he remains displaced. Through his ubiquitous process of contemporary collage he presents a dystopic vision of paradise, evacuating images of Palestine’s architecture and agriculture from their consignment to archives and hinting at the region’s underlying complexities through juxtaposition against more recent structural impositions. Harb’s 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, loss, longing and belonging.