Born in 1980 in Gaza, Palestinian artist Hazem Harb currently lives between Rome, Italy and Dubai, UAE. In 2004, Harb enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. He graduated from the European Institute of Design in 2009. Harb deals with a number of core issues including war, loss, trauma, human vulnerability and global instability. He continues to explore his work across multiple mediums, using each and every tool at his disposal.

These are not photographs, their edges jut beyond the confines of the frame, nudging into the realm of the 3-dimensional. The implied structure instigates an encounter with the past, departing from the idea of the archival as an aide-memoire or even an assemblage. These are newly forged objects, displaced from the past through an engaged process of transformation. With the physicality of an encounter, one which exists and is shaped by time and space, these memories incongruously exist right now. The sense of encounter gives rise to an opportunity for dialogue. Yet, even in these moments in which memory is made current, the fragmented, faulty structures are revealed. Harb becomes an archaeologist and architect of the past, providing directions compiled with the meticulous and attentive care of an engineer. What is re-proposed here is a new process. Emphasising the durational, mutable quality of memory, Harb demonstrates the flux of remembering, creating a contemporary catalyst where he “gives birth to something, which gives birth to something else”.

In 2011, Harb was awarded a residency at The Delfina Foundation, supported by the A.M Qattan Foundation, which also awarded him the Young Artist of the Year Award in 2008. His series Beyond Memory was acquired by the British Museum in 2013. Harb has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions internationally.

Nadia Kaabi-Linke was born in Tunis, Tunisia, 1978, and raised in Tunisia and the United Arab Emirates. She graduated from the University of Fine Arts, Tunis, in 1999, and earned a PhD at Université Paris-Sorbonne in 2008. Growing up between Tunis, Kiev, and Dubai, and now residing in Berlin, Kaabi-Linke’s personal history of migration across cultures and borders has greatly influenced her work. With subtlety and concision, her works give physical presence to that which tends to remain invisible, be it people, structures, or the geopolitical forces that shape and control them. Kaabi-Linke takes inspiration from the forgotten or misused urban spaces around her.

Black is the New White consists in a poster displaying an advertisement, which promotes an imaginary clothing line of male Gulf Arab dress, consisting of a black kandoura and ghutra, under the imaginary brand “Joseph Van Helt”. Glossy photos in magazine or posters tell us what we should wear, even when the clothes or accessories advertised can be unflattering or even, in the case of high heels, painful. But if the way we dress is often dictated by persuasive advertising, it can also be the result of powerful traditions, such as the black abaya that women wear in the Gulf countries. For Kaabi-Linke the abaya is an instrument of control, preventing women from going outdoors, because of the inconvenience of wearing black clothing in hot weather. In Black is the New White, Nadia Kaabi-Linke aims to undermine tradition through the visual language of advertising, promoting an equivalent outfit for men, a black kandoura. For Kaabi-Linke, the question is simple: if women accept to wear black in the hot sun, why could not men do the same? The name of the imaginary brand is inspired by the story of Joseph, or Yûsuf, one of Jacob’s sons (Genesis 1:39 in The Bible and Sūrah 12 in the Qur’an). Joseph story is about a man of exceptional beauty. Envied by his brothers, he then became the victim of women’s passions. After being wrongly accused by women whose advances he rejected, he was sent to prison. For Kaabi- Linke, more than a story about a man, Joseph is a metaphor of women’s destiny. Just like Joseph was jailed because of his beauty, women in traditional Islamic countries veil their face and body in a black cloth, for the same reason.

Kaabi-Linke has had solo exhibitions at Centro de Arte Moderna, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon and the Mosaic Rooms, London in 2014, as well as Dallas Contemporary, Texas in 2015. Selected group exhibition highlights include shows at Bahrain National Museum, Manama, Nam June Paik Art Center, Seoul and Museum of Modern Art, New York, all in 2013; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark in 2014; and Marta Herford Museum, Germany and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, both in 2016. She has participated in numerous biennales, including Venice Biennale 2011, Liverpool Biennial 2012 and Kochi-Muziris Biennial, Kerala, India 2012.

Born 1988, Walid Al Wawi is a Jordanian Palestinian-native artist, working often in video and performance, concerned with the hybridisation of the modern Middle Eastern identity and the implication of what the artist calls “geo-political claustrophobia” upon cultural naturalisation.

Portrait Patriot consists of two A3 digital- colour prints of the artist’s passport photo, one of which is hand manipulated through constant rubber erasure and pencil drawing. The work attempts to deal with the contemporary image of the average Middle Eastern individual as he faces a form of “geo-political claustrophobia”, where borders of countries and geographical locations forcibly place him in a shallow and restricting dialogue. The work, a self- portrait of the artist, is a reprint of the artist’s “failed passport photo”, which he later hand-manipulated through forced erasure and pencil drawing, humorously but disparately trying to generate a peaceful and accepted image of himself.

In 2011, Walid was awarded The Sheikha Manal Young Artist Award. Since then he had collaborated on group exhibitions, and was put through a residential experience leading to his first solo show, later contributing to international and local art festivals. He made his first live performance in late 2014 at FIAC in Paris. Walid’s work has been added to many collections throughout his career thus far, including a recent acquisition by collection of his Highness Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan. Recently. Walid went through the Salama Bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Emerging Artist Fellowship Programme to pursue his masters in the Fine Arts at Central Saint Martins College of Art, London, where he currently lives and studies.