Coming out as Palestinian is an essay by Zahira Jaser, published in the Financial Times Weekend Magazine on 30 March 2024. Jaser, an academic at the University of Sussex who is Palestinian and Italian, writes about the years in which she did not speak publicly about her heritage, the moment during the bombing of Gaza in 2021 when that changed, and why she now feels a duty to proclaim it. The essay sets her own experiences of discrimination beside research on anti Palestinian racism by the scholars Yasmeen Abu-Laban and Abigail Bakan.
The magazine illustrated the essay with The Silk Line of Identity (2020) by Hazem Harb, a layered collage of archival fine art photography, credited courtesy of the artist. Its presence on the opening spread links Jaser's account of identity, memory and visibility to an artist whose work turns on the same questions.
Hazem Harb moved from Gaza to Rome, where he took his MFA at the European Institute of Design, and then to the UAE. Working as a researcher, he gathers photographs, negatives and maps and stitches them together through collage with geometric precision, treating his practice as a visual excavation that invites a rethinking of history rather than nostalgia. His work explores the pressured relationship between people and places and the ways a homeland can be carved up and redrawn. Hazem Harb is represented by Tabari, at Gate Village Building 3, Podium Level, DIFC.
