Melissa Gronlund visited Hazem Harb's studio in Dubai for The National to see how his archive of photographs, maps and documents from Palestine's past had begun to enter his collages.
Harb tells Gronlund that after art college he reached a turning point, asking whether he wanted to be "an artist with a mission in life or just a good painter". He turned back to Palestine and began collecting material from before the occupation: photographs, negatives, slides, Palestinian pounds and maps going back to the 1600s. Friends and Palestinian families around the world have since donated items, and his studio in Umm Suqeim stores them with archival care.
Around four years before the interview, he started painting large, almost architectural fields of colour and slowly folding the archive into them. The article describes This Place Is Mine (2018), with an olive tree and a man on the Mount of Olives, and Power Does Not Defeat Memory (2018), where grey stands for concrete and colonisation. "I want to put the images back into time," he says.
Gronlund traces his life from a childhood in Gaza during the First Intifada to a scholarship at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome at 15, where he first felt the distance of exile. The piece closes by noting his forthcoming show at Sabsay in Copenhagen from 31 January 2019. Hazem Harb is represented by Tabari.
