The Markaz Review published Featured Artist Hazem Harb: 'Back to Zero', a profile by Malu Halasa, on 3 May 2024. It begins with the arrest of the artist's father, Riad Harb, in Gaza that February, his disappearance and the knowledge that he had been tortured in captivity, events that turned the artist "upside down" and "back to zero". His father was later released, but, Halasa writes, the raw upset remains.
The profile sets the work made in that period against Harb's earlier, precise collages: The Mother Land (2022), where a 1930s map of Palestine overlays a woman's face; The Family Tree (2021), built from a 1945 engagement portrait of the al Dajani family; the Hollyland series, which plays Holy Land against Hollywood; and Liquid City (2021), a cityscape of olive oil cans. The war, Halasa explains, took him back to drawing for the first time in nearly a decade. His charcoal series Dystopia Is Not a Noun, which he calls drawings from "the gut", was shown at Tabari the previous November, and Gauze, 22 framed works of white gauze on brown cardboard made during his father's captivity, was exhibited at the gallery earlier that year. Harb tells Halasa he plans to keep the series.
Hazem Harb grew up in Gaza, took his MFA in Rome and is based in Dubai, where his archive based practice examines Palestinian history, displacement and erasure. He is represented by Tabari.
