Vogue Arabia's "In the Studio" strand profiles artists at work, and this instalment turned to the Syrian-Druze artist Randa Maddah, whose sculpture, installation and video practice is rooted in her birthplace of Majdal Shams in the occupied Golan Heights. Maddah, who is represented by Tabari Artspace, has built her practice around the experience of displacement, using ruined and reconstructed domestic space as her recurring material.
Her best-known work, the video Light Horizon, shows her rebuilding and then setting alight a room inside the shell of a bombed family house in Ain Fit, a gesture that reads as both an act of restoration and of refusal. Elsewhere her sculpture and installation work returns often to olive trees and agricultural land, motifs she uses to talk about dispossession and the slow erasure of a place from its own history. That combination of intimate, handmade materials and a landscape marked by conflict has carried her work to international platforms including the Sharjah Biennial and the Venice Biennale.
A studio feature in a magazine such as Vogue Arabia sits differently to a gallery review: its interest is process rather than argument, giving readers a sense of how Maddah's works are physically made before they reach an exhibition wall. That attention follows a period in which her profile with Tabari Artspace has continued to grow across regional and international presentations.
