Jyoti Kalsi reviews Hazem Harb's solo exhibition Contemporary Heritage at Tabari for Gulf News, a show that presents heritage as unfixed and fluid.
Writing for Weekend Review, Kalsi explains that Harb, born in Gaza in 1980 and living between Dubai and Rome, collects photographs, coins, letters and maps of Palestine from before and during British rule, and uses these fragments to bring collective memory into the present. The review notes that the United Nations had just marked World Heritage Day, and that while the world was learning to live in quarantine, Harb's work recalled communities that have lived under restrictions for generations.
The exhibition included collages from his 2018 series The Place is Mine, shaped like floor plans of houses and combining 1920s images of the landscapes around Jerusalem with portraits of Palestinians in embroidered dress. Kalsi reads the thick lines between the photographs as the segmented landscape of today, and the gaps as the spaces through which history is erased.
She also describes The Silk Line of Identity, built from a late nineteenth century photograph of a woman in a Bethlehem dress, sliced and collaged into a pattern that recalls embroidery, and Shade of Memory, a lightbox relief made from his etching of a 1931 Palestinian protest, worked over six months. The article pointed readers to the gallery's 360 degree virtual tour of the show.
