Afterall published Hazem Harb: 'My Heart Is Still in Gaza', an essay by Melissa Gronlund, on 10 September 2024. It opens in Harb's Dubai studio, where a modern key to his family's house in Gaza, now destroyed, sits beside a Nakba era key more than 75 years old, the two forming what Gronlund calls a sad duo, a symbol of displacement joined by a symbol of personal loss.
Gronlund surveys two decades of work. His early paintings in oil, charcoal and pastel were shaped by the Second Intifada, and in the performance EXIT (2004) he bandaged himself in gauze until he was trapped and bound, corpselike. His turn to architecture fed The Invisible Landscape and Concrete Futures (2015) at the Salsali Private Museum, and his archive came together in Temporary Museum. For Palestine. (2021 to 2022) at Maraya Art Centre in Sharjah. After October 2023, she explains, Harb asked to change his Tabari presentation at Abu Dhabi Art, showing five large charcoal works of bodies contending with violent force, and in January 2024 presented Gauze, curated by Munira Al Sayegh, at the gallery in Dubai, where gauze dries into ghostly shapes echoing the dead and wounded. "Everything I had I put into them," Harb says of the charcoal drawings.
Hazem Harb, born in Gaza, studied in Rome and is based in Dubai, building his practice from archival photographs, maps and collage as a form of visual excavation. He is represented by Tabari, Gate Village Building 3, Podium Level, DIFC.
