Selections gave its sixty-seventh issue, The Artistic Unity Issue, over to the art scene of the United Arab Emirates, and this conversation with Hazem Harb was put to him through Tabari Artspace, the Dubai gallery that has represented him since 2017. The Palestinian artist, born in Gaza, speaks about settling in Dubai in 2013 and treating the city as an adopted home.
Harb traces a turning point to around 2012, when personal and political upheaval pushed him to work across more media, and to a six-month residency at Satellite Space, the warehouse gallery run by the curator Rami Farook, where raw building materials entered his practice. He discusses Beyond Memory (2012), in which geometric forms are laid over archival photographs of Palestinian social life, and the later bodies of work Archaeology of Occupation (2015), Reformulated Archaeology (2018) and Bauhaus as Imperialism (2019). Concrete and architecture recur throughout as metaphors for collective memory. He also recalls his 2015 solo exhibition The Invisible Landscape and Concrete Futures at Salsali Private Museum, his curation of Mohammed Joha's Fabric of Memory at Tabari in 2019, and Gauze, a solo show co-curated with the Emirati curator Munira Al Sayegh.
He describes a working network of Palestinian diaspora artists and his own mentoring of younger practitioners from the region. With work held by the Barjeel Art Foundation and the Sharjah Art Foundation, Hazem Harb frames his task less as driving regional innovation than as sustaining a practice that examines systems of control.
