Meer, formerly Wall Street International, publishes Sabsay's announcement of Power Does Not Defeat Memory, Hazem Harb's solo exhibition at the Copenhagen gallery.
The text explains that the exhibition recovers forgotten moments of Palestine's past and reintroduces them in collages of photographic material and architectural shapes. Harb assembles historical photographs, negatives and slides, rich in imagery of Palestinian culture and history, so that the past casts light on the present and the images are rebuilt from the archive itself. "I want to put the images back into time," the artist says. "Philosophically time stopped at that moment [of the Naqba]. Now they are part of the present again."
The announcement places the show in a moment of growing attention to Arab and Palestinian artists, in the United States at institutions such as the Met and MoMA, and in Denmark, where Larissa Sansour had been chosen for the Venice Biennale that year. Sabsay's Masha Faurschou describes how Harb channels the story of his people, entangled with his own, into compositions that carry the Palestinian voice through their beauty. The text describes him cutting reality apart and gathering the fragments into a new whole, exploring the experience and memory of being in place and of being displaced.
The exhibition ran from 31 January to 23 March 2019 and is recorded in Tabari's exhibition archive. Hazem Harb is represented by Tabari.
