In his studio in Dubai, the artist Hazem Harb recently placed one of his keys next to a larger, metal one, with a solid tubular spine and an ornate, almost heart-shaped handle. They sit together on the little tray on which Harb serves coffee and tea to guests. It is a sad duo: before October 2023, the more than 75-year-old key was a symbol, an archival object that testified to the Palestinian displacement and their hopes of return. And Harb’s thinner, cheaper, modern key was simply how he unlocked the door to his family’s house in Gaza. That house is now destroyed, along with everything in it. The key has joined the status of symbol – of the wholesale and, for Harb, personal destruction of Israel’s ongoing war on Palestine. The Nakba-era key has also been changed retroactively. It is not isolated, but the first in a pair.
The historical echoes of the current assault on Gaza are some of the most heartbreaking elements of the tragedy, in part because they give the lie to the idea that, had the world been aware of the Nakba in 1948, they would have stopped it. Instead, the global non-response has been made clear, and its reasons – racism? cowardice? complicity? – damning.
This essay, on the work of Hazem Harb, was under discussion before the 7 October Hamas attacks that precipitated the Israeli invasion of Gaza. But now its subject too, in its own scale, is part of the historical synchronicity that plagues this conflict – because, as if in a case of whiplash, Harb has jettisoned the installation and collage work on which he has built his current reputation, and gone back, in fury and out of pain, to the expressive canvases of tortured bodies that he began painting as a teenager in Gaza.
‘In Arabic we say, mina al saitra ela alla sitara – meaning from control to non-control,’ Harb told me. ‘My life has become upside down, from white to black. I was working on the Paradise Lost series, scanning and sketching and thinking, researching, reading about the archives. But suddenly, I went back to charcoal – I never thought I would.’
Harb’s paintings of this kind were last exhibited publicly in 2010, at his solo show at The Mosaic Rooms in London, ‘Is This Your First Time in Gaza?’ – a title that now seems like an ebbed-away memory, of Gaza as a place for tourists, with resorts on the sea and plans for an international airport. And now this text itself is out of time – partially a discussion of the work that Harb was making over the past ten years, and which he might well return to, and partially a discussion of the work that he is making now. But time also seems to be the leitmotif of Harb’s work: of returning the past to the present time, and running out of time, being bested by time’s obliteration.
The Biographical Details
Harb was born in Gaza City in 1980. He began drawing from an early age, and would rifle through the family photographs that his mother, a seamstress, kept in a metal box; she, in turn, would keep all his drawings in the see-through sleeves of plastic folders. He drew images of the human form, often in thick, heavy-handed, almost angry brushstrokes in oil, charcoal, and pastel, which boldly and economically delineated the figure.01 The conditions in Gaza, particularly the violence of the Second Intifada, were ever-present. In one performance, EXIT (2004), he bandaged himself up in gauze – a material that will poignantly return, notably as the title of his early 2024 show at Tabari Artspace in Dubai – until he was trapped and bound, corpselike, in the white fabric.
At the age of twenty-four, he won a scholarship to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, where his painting grew more abstract but remained emotionally expressive. He began experimenting in performance, photography, and video, and thinking about how he could use these media to contest dominant narratives about Palestine. And in 2013, Harb moved to Dubai, where he still lives. The early 2010s in the United Arab Emirates were a transitional time between the fast-paced, giddy years of artists and galleries establishing themselves, and the slower shift into the settled landscape that exists today. Harb was given a six-month residency at Satellite, a space run by Rami Farook, an artist and cultural producer who was key in supporting a number of young, critical artists. His practice was becoming, in a sense, more cerebral. Harb started a research project into architecture to understand how the built environment could become an engine of oppression. This informed his 2015 show ‘The Invisible Landscape and Concrete Futures’, curated by Lara Khaldi, at the Salsali Private Museum in Dubai.
The exhibition investigated the Modernist architecture that remade Tel Aviv – formerly Jaffa – when German-Jewish architects, fleeing Nazism, emigrated to Palestine between 1933 and 1945. The winding streets of the former villages were razed to make way for new, updated buildings, for new inhabitants, under a plan devised by the Scottish urban planner Patrick Geddes and called, rather tellingly, the White City. Harb collaged together images of Tel Aviv’s smooth modernist homes with large squares in dark greys, blacks and beige, as vocal reminders of the erasure of the Palestinian people who used to live in the Jaffa region. Small suitcases, lying open with limited contents, referred to the paths outwards in the diaspora.
The series Bauhaus as Imperialism (2015) formed the basis for the restrained, collagist idiom that he has continued to work in since. In series such as Power Does Not Defeat Memory (2019) and Paradise Lost (2020), he collages early photographs of Palestine together with large rectangles in earthy palettes. For Harb, using archival photographs and other ephemera from Palestine plays a role of testimony: it reintroduces the images of a pre-1948 Palestine back into circulation, rescuing them from oblivion – ‘putting them back into time,’ he says. The effect is also one of distancing, suggesting the borders and obstruction that were overlaid on the Palestinian land after the Nakba, as well as the idea of a history that can never fully be known – a land that can never fully be seen.
At the same time as he was collecting these photographs, Harb was also acquiring Palestinian material, a practice that began while he was in Rome: maps, coins and notes, passports, images, census information, directories of tradesmen, travel guides, information about native flora and fauna, and slides for old-fashioned stereoscopes that would show the country in 3D. He now has thousands of objects that he stores under museum-worthy conditions, showing them to visitors with gloves on or exhibiting them in display cabinets in his studio. These objects are proof, he says, that Palestine existed as a free, independent state, and testify against the currents of obliteration that are working to remove the idea of Palestine and of the Palestinian people themselves.
These two practices came together in his break-out, stunning show ‘Temporary Museum. For Palestine.’ (2021–22) at the Maraya Art Centre in Sharjah, curated by Cima Azzam. The work drew on his archive, showing works such as a 1901 topographical map of Palestine produced by the Edinburgh Geographical Institute; two prints made of the first known ‘reliable’ map of the country, from 1883; and a casual photograph of four members of the Dajani family, an important family in Jerusalem and one that alludes to the unbroken length of Palestinian elite history. He displayed other historical items, such as his stereoscope slides, as well as photographs in a mock blueprint of the Palestine Archaeological Museum, which opened (funded by John D. Rockefeller) in 1925. Two collage series, in which his typical coloured paper were swapped out for coloured Plexiglas, looked at the olive tree and the Jordan River. Lastly, he covered an entire wall in a photograph of the Library of Congress, creating a jarring trompe l’oeil effect of being in a historical archive. The mismatch was deliberate: the dusty, European hall of knowledge sat there like an indifferent quotation of history’s responsibility – an abdication in the respect of anyone properly caring for Palestinian material.
Archives as Reality
The idea of archives as sitting between the realm of artistic fiction and that of reality bears comparison to Khalil Rabah’s The Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind (2005–ongoing), in which the Ramallah-based artist creates a vast, multi-winged fictive museum, complete with display structures and objects such as textiles, (fake) animals and artworks. Elsewhere, Rabah mimics other signature elements of a nation-state, such as the national airline. Unlike Harb, Rabah does not use archival material, and includes a focus on infrastructure – the display cases of the museum or its gift shop, or, in the case of the airline, a shoddily designed logo cobbled together from different carriers. (Rasha Salti makes the point that this logo also shows the mediocrity of the Palestinian authorities – who cannot even get it together, in essence, to put together good graphic design.02) And he pushes this, almost as if playing the role of the holy fool, into legal and governmental channels. In After 12 Years (1995–2008), for example, Rabah transplanted – in a literal sense – five olive trees from Ramallah to the UN in Geneva. He left them for twelve years, and then petitioned the Swiss government for their citizenship, which was legally due to any being who had been in Switzerland for a dozen years. Similarly his Riwaq Biennale began as an art project in 2005 and then grew into a genuine collaborative exhibitory framework (a biennial). In part, this is critique, and also artists jumping into the breach. For Harb, in absence of proper documentation of Palestine, his archive has real value – his first edition of The People of All Nations, a book from the 1920s documenting ethnic groups from around the world, counters the information campaign that there is no such thing as the Palestinian people. The tragedy of ‘Temporary Museum’ is that it is, in fact, the museum.
Like Rabah’s works, ‘Temporary Museum’ provoked the sensation of the imaginary made real – an echo of its inverse, the real made imaginary, which is what happened to the Palestinian state after the Nakba. How do we explain that a state ceased to be, particularly in a world of apparent rules-based order after World War II? Echoes of the fictiveness – and sense of injustice at this fictiveness – also appear throughout other diaspora art projects, many of which touch on the archive and institutionalism, both in the sense of a critique of the post-Oslo Accords institution-building in the West Bank, and laced through with surrealism or mixing between the roles of official and imaginary archives. At the 16th Lyon Biennale in 2022, which took a defunct natural history museum as one of its venues, the Swedish-born Palestinian artist Tarik Kiswanson mounted the museum’s wood-panelled vitrines on the ceiling, with enormous, smooth, egg-shaped white sculptures underneath them. The effect was hallucinatory, as if some part of the world’s collective subconscious had risen from below and dislodged the vitrines from their typical position. Ala Younis, a Palestinian artist based in Jordan, looks at the position of the counter-factual, which she documents as if real, such as a careful display of a Frank Lloyd Wright cultural complex that was never built in Baghdad (Plan for Greater Baghdad, 2015). Forensic Architecture, likewise, use the art space to conduct real investigations, in Palestine and throughout the Arab world. The artists point an accusatory finger at the state of Israel and at the international norms that legitimised the Israeli occupation and the continued strictures that governed life in the West Bank and Gaza before and after the Oslo Accords.
Back to Black
After the events of 7 October, and Israel’s onslaught of a reply, Harb’s work completely changed – it returned to the raw expressiveness with which it began. Imagine if Philip Guston, in a reversal of a reversal, had gone back to abstract expressionism.
Harb asked for an extension for his Tabari Artspace presentation at the Abu Dhabi Art fair last November, so that he could present different work than the collages they had been expecting, which was accepted. Instead he exhibited five large-scale charcoal pieces, depicting bodies contending with some unnamed, violent force. He continued to work in charcoal and in January presented ‘Gauze’, curated by Munira Al Sayegh, at Tabari’s Dubai gallery. The show combined paintings from the early 2000s, such as The Widow and The Dance of Escape, with a new series of charcoal works. Its title came from the series ‘Gauze’ – a word that itself comes from Gaza, which used to have a substantial textile industry. Working quickly, Harb laid strips of gauze on 48 × 33cm canvases. Letting the fabric dry, it assumes anthropomorphic shapes – ghostly wraiths that echo the dead and wounded in Gaza itself, like the strip of land has returned to its namesake as if by sick joke.
His new charcoals, the series Dystopia Is Not a Noun (2024), show figures clutching each other in gestures of protection and fear. Their immediacy is overwhelming – they are the obvious riposte to a situation that is unfolding not in terms of cold institutions but in the heat of crushed, maimed limbs, surgical operations performed without anaesthesia, the warmth of a child flowing out of her as a mother holds her. Harb says he makes them to stay sane – his family is still in Gaza, and for a period last February his elderly father was detained by the Israelis and beaten. Harb did not know if he was alive or dead; he can only reach his family from time to time because of intermittent electricity and phone signals. His family home, where he grew up, has been flattened. All of his child mementoes are now dust. He has only the portfolio of his work that he took from Gaza when he moved to Italy – including the pictures he has drawn of his mother, who died fourteen years ago and whose death anniversary he marks each year – and the spirit of frustration and desperation that he has revived in his charcoals today.
The immediacy is not just in the raw expressiveness of the canvases, but in the way of working itself. Harb describes the process of drawing with charcoal as a physical act. It requires large brushstrokes across the canvas onto which he drips sweat, mixing with the charcoal so that the painting bears a part of him. He leaves the excess charcoal and moisture to drip down the canvas, as if documentation of this performance: ‘Everything I had I put into them,’ says Harb. ‘I was drawing from my gut and from my skin – the charcoal is mixed with the touch of my skin, salt, my body. It is my DNA and my drawing.’
His studies in gauze are likewise a race against time, as he must configure the textile composition before the material is dried. Gone are the longitudinal vistas of time that existed in his reuse of the archive. Harb’s sense of time is now reduced to the shortened horizons of the Gazans under siege: if we can just make it through the night, through this one airstrike, through the time it takes to buy food and return. For Harb, watching and responding to videos of Palestine via social media, time is even further truncated into the fifteen seconds of each Instagram story page, which he fills each night with angry invective.
The standpoint of a journal such as this is to set down, as it were, words about artists’ practices for all time – though here we are facing the open wound of Harb’s current practice. Asking how long Harb’s work will remain in this tortured, manic phase of production is really asking: how long will the war last? The pair are inseparable from each other: his work and Palestine. Harb finds himself living a tragedy that now has not happened once, but twice – that has turned from a single instantiation of mass displacement and land occupation into a series, of extreme punctuation marks amidst low-level activity of the same.
Harb’s return to his previous idiom is not only a return to a type of art-making that is more emotional at a time of great pain. It is also the consequence of a time that won’t move forward, but which instead recurs and obliterates in equal measure. And in a sense it has already erased the agency he asserted over the idea of return, in taking him away from his collagist project of returning images and objects of Palestine to the spotlight of the present. He has been shifted against his will to a moment of pure contemporaneity – denied even the temporary museum, though he remains convinced of its importance and says he will return to it.
Today the people of Palestine and the rest of the region are living through perhaps the darkest moment in their modern history. In such a period, one may wonder why a painter like myself, living in a safe distance from my country of birth, continues to doggedly pursue research in Palestine’s art history. The answer to that may only be found in words written during one of the darkest moments in the modern history of Europe. Soon after the Second World War broke out, Walter Benjamin wrote, ‘every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably…’03
Those are not Harb’s words, and were not written in 2023 or 2024. They were published twenty years prior by the late artist Kamal Boullata, who was born in Jerusalem and died in exile. And yet here we are again.
Footnotes
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See also Laura Cherrie Beaney, ‘Fragments of the Future: The Trajectory of Hazem Harb’, in Temporary Museum (exh. cat.), Sharjah: Maraya Art Centre, 2021, pp.40–49 for a good account of his early years and subsequent work.
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Rasha Salti, ‘Khalil Rabah: Subterfuge and Fugitive Acts’, in Anthony Downey (ed.), Khalil Rabah: Falling Forward, Works 1995–2005 (exh. cat.), Sharjah: Sharjah Art Foundation, 2003, p.388.
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Kamal Boullata, ‘Innovation in Palestinian Art’, in There Where You Are Not (ed. Finbarr Barry Flood), Munich: Hirmer, 2019, p. 214. The Benjamin quote is from ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations (ed. Hannah Arendt), London: Fontana/Collins, 1982, p.257.