On the occasion of Mathaf’s fifteenth anniversary, we refuse_d brings together fifteen artists invited to explore the tensions between refusal, endurance, and action. Developed collectively and organically, the exhibition emerges from ongoing conversations between the artists and the curators. These exchanges were shaped by shared commitments and the need to present artistic positions that confront the immediacy of our current moment and affirm the urgency of sustaining networks of solidarity.

The exhibition responds to an escalating wave of cancellations, censorship, silencing, and public vilification directed at artists, writers, musicians, and scholars who have taken clear and often courageous stances on war, conflict, and uprisings. More recently, in the context of the war on Palestine, many have chosen to withdraw from exhibitions and cultural events—often at significant personal and professional cost. In such a climate, the act of making art becomes both a gesture of presence and an act of refusal: we refuse to stop making art, to stop caring, to stop thinking, to give up, to disappear, to be refused…

we refuse_d evokes the spirit of the Salon des Refusés—not as historical citation, but as a symbolic event: an exhibition that mattered, an alternative space for critical engagement, one that operated outside dominant political and institutional discourses, a platform that gave visibility to marginal voices. This reference recalls a time when to exhibit was to find friends and allies for the struggle, and reasserts the agency of artists as public intellectuals. The title also echoes Hannah Arendt’s 1943 seminal essay We Refugees, resonating with the shared disquiet, absurdity, and fragile optimism born from displacement, trauma, and exile. 

Most of the works on view were commissioned specifically for we refuse_d. The artists—many of whom are also influential cultural workers, founders of alternative spaces, educators, researchers and thinkers—share a strong commitment to critical and collective practice. Born between 1936 and 1991, they show that artistic engagement is not fixed to a moment in time but shaped across generations, contexts, and lived experience. Their works are not passive responses but active and subtle propositions that interrogate the conditions of their making.

In recent years, many of these artists have faced loss, displacement, and silencing. While they are far from being the only ones, they speak here on behalf of a broader collective. Through the lens of refusal, their works trace paths of persistence, resistance, decruelling, heritage, community, collective care, and repair.

Above all, we refuse_d is an exhibition about life, presence, and the necessity of making art.

Curators: Vasıf Kortun and Nadia Radwan
Exhibition designer: Emirhan Altuner

 

The artists' projects are presented in the order of the exhibition's trajectory at Mathaf.

 

DAAR – Decolonizing Architecture Art Research

The artistic research practice of DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Research), founded by Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, operates at the intersection of architecture, art, pedagogy, and politics. For over two decades, their collaborative work, both theoretical and practically engaged, has reimagined spaces of exile, displacement, and resistance, transforming art exhibitions into active platforms for civic engagement, education, and political imagination. 

Their projects function as both sites of display and action, extending into architectural structures, critical learning environments, and interventions that challenge dominant collective narratives and new political imaginaries. Through seminal publications like Architecture after Revolution and Refugee Heritage, DAAR questions dominant narratives of heritage and nationhood, advocating instead for decolonial futures rooted in lived experience. Their interventions—such as the Concrete Tent in Dheisheh refugee camp or the reimagined Shu’fat School for Girls—embody architecture as both physical structure and site of learning, care, and collective memory.

Central to their practice is Campus in Camps, an experimental university in a refugee camp that redefines who produces knowledge and where. This commitment to informal, community-based learning continues through The Tree School developed across various locations worldwide. DAAR’s work consistently connects to local struggles with global questions of justice and demonstrates how architecture and art can propose and inhabit alternative narratives and spaces.

The Refugee Heritage project challenges conventional understandings of heritage in relation to the refugee experience. It proposes alternative approaches to heritage centered on non-hegemonic narratives and the experiences of marginalized communities. Ultimately, Refugee Heritage aims to reframe the discourse on refugees and displacement, moving beyond humanitarianism toward a more just and equitable future.

 

Samia Halaby

Samia Halaby is a pioneering Palestinian artist, scholar, and activist whose six-decade career has redefined the scope and politics of abstract painting. Born in Jerusalem and based in New York City since the 1970s, Halaby is widely recognized as one of the most important figures in contemporary Arab art. Rooted in a lifelong investigation of abstraction, her practice is grounded in continuous experimentation, drawing from sources as varied as Islamic architecture, Russian Constructivism and Abstract Expressionism. Refusing the binary of East and West or nationalist and universalist discourses, Halaby’s abstract compositions are rooted in a deep engagement with movement, rhythm, and visual perception, often inspired by natural forms, urban landscapes, and the geometry of traditional Islamic art. 

She coined the term "Arabic abstraction" challenging western hierarchies to reclaim aesthetic forms historically dismissed as decorative, advocating for their conceptual and structural complexity as a visual language grounded in social struggle. Drawing inspiration from early modernist movements and the logic of natural systems, her paintings explore how visual structures can evoke dynamic, optical, emotional, and social forces. In the 1980s, she became one of the earliest artists to experiment with digital media, developing computer-generated visual performances that reflected her interest in the intersections of technology, abstraction, and sound.

Alongside her artistic practice, Halaby is a committed educator and writer. She was the first woman to teach at Yale University’s School of Art and has authored several texts, including Liberation Art of Palestine, a foundational work on Palestinian visual culture. Throughout her career, she has emphasized the political agency of abstraction—challenging western art historical narratives, redefining art as craft, and using that skill to develop another facet of her practice: documentary art, as a means of political expression and cultural preservation. Halaby’s work speaks to themes of displacement, collective memory, and the enduring struggle for justice and self-determination of Palestinian people.

Most of the paintings included in this space were part of Samia Halaby’s canceled retrospective at Indiana University at Bloomington’s Eskenazi Museum a month before its scheduled opening in February 2024. Her presence in we refuse_d is an homage to her legacy.

 

Walid Raad
In collaboration with Pierre Huyghebaert

Walid Raad is a visual artist and professor whose multidisciplinary practice explores how violence, memory, and narrative shape personal and collective histories. Deeply informed by his experiences during the Lebanese wars and the broader political realities of the Middle East, Raad’s work spans photography, video, performance, and text. Across these forms, he engages how events are remembered, recorded, and transmitted—frequently creating imaginary documents and stories.

Raad’s documents and stories expose the mechanisms through which histories are constructed. His landmark project The Atlas Group (1989–2004) presents a fictional archive of Lebanon’s recent past, composed of imagined documents, photographs, and testimonies. In his ongoing series Scratching on Things I Could Disavow, Raad shifts his focus to the rapid rise of art institutions in the Arab world. Through installations and performances, he examines the ideological and economic frameworks and the counter-intuitive concepts, gestures, and forms that shape cultural production in the region.

Raad’s practice resides at the intersection of conceptual art, archival research, and speculative fiction. His work reveals how power and violence influence not only what is remembered, but how memory itself is organized and mediated. Through these investigations, he invites viewers to marvel at how art may produce and unsettle fraught histories.

I thought I’d escape my fate (again) engages with the multifaceted notion of “refusal” in both broad terms and through specific experiences. The installation was created in collaboration with graphic designer Pierre Huyghebaert,—who teaches at La Cambre Art School in Brussels and leads the Speculoos studio— and whose practice focuses on using free software to rethink collaborative processes across cartography, type design, web interfaces, schematic illustration, and book design. The project brings together statements from those who have cancelled art exhibitions, lectures, and concerts related to Palestine, as well as voices of those whose events were cancelled. The layered and blurred quotes, in English, French, Arabic, and German, create an abstract, three-dimensional, almost illegible effect. This intentional blurring serves as a meta-commentary on refusal itself, while also highlighting the institutional use of text as a mechanism of power and control. I thought I’d escape my fate (again) asks viewers to reflect on refusal as both a visible act of dissent and a subtle form of suppression within cultural institutions.

 

Khalil Rabah

Khalil Rabah is a conceptual artist whose work critically examines the politics of representation, heritage, and displacement. Drawing on the tools and aesthetics of museology, archival systems, and institutional display, Rabah constructs speculative frameworks that question how histories are written and how knowledge is shaped by power.

A central component of his practice is the ongoing project The Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind—a fictional institution that operates as both artwork and critique. Through this and related works, Rabah explores the erasure and fabrication of narratives within colonial and postcolonial contexts, particularly in relation to Palestine. 

The notion of displacement, both political and philosophical, is central to his work. By incorporating materials such as olive trees, soil, and stone, Rabah situates these symbols of resilience and rootedness within globalized art institutions, emphasizing their forced dislocation. Through his archives and artifacts, he proposes fragmented, subjective counter-histories that resist official erasures.

Beyond his artistic practice, Rabah has played a central role in shaping cultural institutions in Palestine. He is a co-founder of the Al Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art, and as initiator and artistic director of the Riwaq Biennale, he has activated and restored historic sites across Palestinian villages, turning heritage restoration into an act of cultural resilience within a fragmented landscape.

Evidence is an installation that reflects on the olive tree as both a living organism and a symbol of rootedness, resilience, and displacement. At its center is an engraved marble plate, depicting either the roots or the leafless twigs of the tree—depending on the viewer’s position—inviting a shifting perspective on belonging and loss. Evidence features 80 delicate oil pastels on paper of severed olive tree trunks that appear almost anatomical, rendered as organic remnants. Together, these elements speak to cycles of growth and destruction, and the olive tree’s enduring cultural, political, and ecological presence.

 

Suha Shoman

Suha Shoman, is a Palestinian-Jordanian artist, cultural activist, and a pivotal figure in contemporary Arab art. Her multifaceted practice spans visual art, film, and institution-building, rooted in a deep commitment to supporting contemporary Arab artists and fostering critical cultural dialogue across the region.

Born in Jerusalem just four years before the Nakba, her life and practice are profoundly shaped by displacement. Her works are often meditative and politically charged, exploring the interwoven themes of land, time, and memory. From her early abstract paintings inspired by the timeless landscapes of Petra to her later video works addressing exile and loss with unmediated directness, this duality between abstraction and activism, memory and testimony defines Shoman’s legacy.

Her artistic journey was decisively shaped by her studies under the influential artist Princess Fahrelnissa Zeid, whom Shoman met after moving to Jordan in 1974. Her transition from painting to video in the early 2000s was not a rupture but an evolution. The luminous abstraction she had developed found new life in video installations that expanded her inquiry into the immaterial: time, light, and memory. 

In parallel with her art-making, Shoman has played a transformative role in shaping cultural infrastructure in the Arab world. In 1988, recognizing the needs of artists in conflict zones, she launched, together with her husband Khalid, an initiative to provide refuge and support for artists fleeing war and violence in their countries. This initiative laid the foundation for the opening in 1993 of Darat al Funun, a home for the arts and artists from the Arab world, which has since become a major platform for contemporary artists, thinkers, and researchers from the region. Through residencies, exhibitions, and public programs, she has fostered spaces for experimentation, reflection, and resistance supporting generations of artists offering them a stable ground to continue their practice and find a community. 

Her video Bayyaratina (Our Orange Grove) recounts the story of her grandfather’s orange groves in Beit Hanoun, northern Gaza, which he started planting in 1929. Merging personal testimony, archival imagery, and realities on the ground, the film traces the life of the orchard, tended across three generations, and its eventual total destruction by occupying military forces, beginning with the early years of the Second Intifada in 2002 and continuing to 2009. Through poetic narration and striking visual contrasts, the film evokes both beauty and rupture rooted in soil and exile, past and present. Bayyaratina conjures a landscape shaped by memory, displacement, and loss.

 

Dima Srouji

Dima Srouji is a Palestinian architect, artist, and researcher whose work excavates the ground—literally and metaphorically—as a site of suppressed histories and potential liberation. Her interdisciplinary practice operates at the intersection of history, colonialism, and the politics of place, exploring spaces for potential collective repair. Through close collaborations with archaeologists, anthropologists, and artisans, Srouji engages with materials such as glass, plaster, archival documents, text, and film to question and challenge the concept of cultural heritage in the Arab world, and particularly within the context of Palestine.

Prompted by the urgency of the violence in Palestine, Srouji’s approach investigates the architectural “what-ifs”: unrealized historical plans, abandoned structures, and speculative designs that gesture toward alternative futures. Through these inquiries, she transforms fragments of survival into tangible visions for collective liberation.

Her project Jaffa: Fragments from a Continuous Modernity explores the unrealized 1946-48 master plan for Jaffa, the last attempt by the city’s Palestinian mayor to present a “modern” vision to the British Mandate authorities, aimed at preventing the city’s occupation. Srouji revives this phantom plan not out of nostalgia, but as a critical reflection on the assumed relationship between modernity and freedom. She uncovers the irony that, by embracing the colonizer’s definition of “modernity,” the plan inherently contained the logic of its own erasure, challenging the assumption that marginalized peoples must perform civilization to exist. In a context where architecture often plays a role in systems of violence, Srouji’s work stands as a powerful reminder of its potential as a tool for memory, a vessel for the spirit, and a foundation for liberation.

 

Taysir Batniji

Taysir Batniji is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores themes of displacement, impermanence, fragility, memory, and the politics of visibility. Born in Gaza, Batniji has lived and worked between Palestine and France since the 1990s. His work spans photography, drawing, painting, video, installation, and performance.

Batniji’s artwork is marked by a poetic restraint and conceptual precision. Rather than presenting overt political statements, he turns to the everyday, the overlooked, and the ephemeral to reflect on the effects of loss, and fragmentation. Drawing from his personal history, collective memory, and broader historical narratives, he approaches his subjects with a sense of poetic detachment—distorting, displacing, and reimagining them to offer layered and critical reflections on lived reality.

For many years, he has been unable to return to Gaza, a rupture that underscores much of his production. Distance, silence, and absence are not merely themes but materials that shape his practice. Through subtle, resonant gestures, he creates contemplative spaces that speak to the precariousness of place, identity, and belonging in a fractured world.

Batniji presents a selection of works centered on the motif of keys, objects he has explored from the 1990’s as powerful metaphors for dispossession and displacement. These works evoke the immobilization Palestinians face in their daily lives, and the inability to control or shape space and time. He also presents Homeless Colors, a series created using found crayons, ballpoint pens, and felt-tip markers. In these drawings, the artist engages in a meditative, almost spiritual process, an intimate retreat from the harsh realities that surround him. Conceived during a time of profound shock in response to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the series reflects a state of collective and personal grief, a silence born of trauma that leaves no room for words.

 

Barış Doğrusöz

Barış Doğrusöz is an artist and filmmaker from Turkey whose multidisciplinary practice explores the entangled narratives of history, memory, and militarized space. Working across video, sculpture, and installation, Doğrusöz uses archival material, archaeological documentation, and architectural forms to critique how knowledge and territory are spatially and materially encoded through military infrastructure and visual language. His practice often engages in what he terms “prequels and premonitions for a near future fiction”, examining how geopolitical and historical narratives are constructed.

For his work INTERSTICES (a dizzying array of combinations), Doğrusöz reimagined his installation Interstices, a dizzying array of combinations (2018), composed initially of 45 abstracted sculptures based on the form of pillboxes, with small apertures for weapons commonly found across Lebanon, Palestine, and conflict zones near sensitive targets like official buildings or interstitial sites like checkpoints. These structures are specifically designed to be invisible or impenetrable in their form while also constructing the boundaries or borders of access.

Doğrusöz’s serial presentation strips them of their original function, transforming them into diagrammatic civilian forms. For we refuse_d, the artist expanded the installation with newly produced sculptures, informed by updated research and architectural military artifacts that reflect post-war developments in Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria.

The work serves as both a formal study of militarized architecture and critical response to the shifting political realities of the region. By cataloging and abstracting these “extropic masks,” Doğrusöz builds a lexicon of resistance, mapping how oppressive structures may be reinterpreted as artifacts of memory and critique. This version of Interstices underscores his commitment to redefining spatial narratives and contesting hegemonic frameworks of historical knowledge.

 

Nour Shantout

Nour Shantout is a  Syrian-Palestinian artist, researcher, and educator whose multidisciplinary practice spans embroidery, installation, text, and collaborative methods. Grounded in a deep engagement with Palestinian embroidery (tatreez), her work treats this traditional craft not merely as heritage but as a living, resistant archive that embodies identity, counter-memory, and intergenerational knowledge.

Her research-based projects trace intimate personal narratives and collective histories, particularly within contexts of displacement and marginalization, such as the Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon. In Searching for the New Dress, Shantout reflects on the transmission of memory and the circulation of embroidered dresses between generations of women in exile, revealing how garments become vessels of everyday survival, counter-mapping, and cultural resilience.

From a postcolonial feminist perspective, Shantout examines the aesthetics of ethnographic display and the structures of institutional knowledge production. She questions how histories are told, who tells them, and through which media. Through layered narrative methodologies and community-based workshops, she cultivates alternative forms of archiving that are grounded in lived experience, embodied practices, and radical care.

Evidence responds to intensified censorship by emerging new visual codes. Artists and cultural workers often blur faces in online documentation—a protective gesture that transforms pixelated squares into subtle symbols of an era marked by constraint. This work reflects on the evolving relationship between language, medium, and temporality. As screenshots of social media posts are used to silence or undermine cultural voices, the exhibition space shifts from a mere site of display to one of negotiation, risk, and resistance. It invites us to consider how acts of refusal—of revealing less, of withholding faces—can paradoxically assert presence and agency.

 

Abdul Hay Mosallam Zarara
(1933, Al-Dawayima –2020, Amman)

Abdul Hay Mosallam Zarara was a self-taught Palestinian artist whose work vividly chronicled the collective memory and struggles of the Palestinian people. Born in Al-Dawayima, his early life was rooted in rural traditions, which deeply informed his later artistic representations of village life, community customs, and oral history. The trauma of the Nakba and the 1948 al-Dawayima massacre, which displaced his family, shaped his lifelong commitment to preserving Palestinian culture through his artistic practice.

After relocating multiple times due to political upheavals, Zarara settled in Libya, where his artistic career began. Using an innovative technique of sawdust and glue to create painted reliefs, he developed a unique visual language centered on themes of resistance and identity. His work merged personal memory with national history, often featuring freedom fighters, revolutionary slogans, and symbolic landscapes. In collaboration with artists like Mustafa Al Hallaj, Zarara played a key role in fostering Palestinian cultural institutions in exile, notably by co-directing the Naji Al Ali Fine Arts Gallery in Damascus.

His practice extended beyond Palestine, portraying global liberation movements in Ireland, Latin America, and South Africa. Over time, his art evolved technically and thematically, shifting from monochrome depictions to vibrant, dynamic compositions. After moving to Amman in 1992, Zarara continued to produce politically and emotionally resonant work, especially highlighting the role of women in resistance. 

Abdul Hay Mosallam Zarara is the only non-living artist featured in we refuse_d. His work is presented posthumously in homage to his legacy, his commitment to art and life, and serves as a powerful testament to resilience, memory, and the enduring struggle for justice.

 

Majd Abdel Hamid

Majd Abdel Hamid is a Palestinian visual artist based between Beirut and Paris. His practice offers a quiet, contemplative engagement with time, trauma, and memory. Working across media, video, installation, drawing, sculpture, and especially embroidery, Abdel Hamid crafts a visual language that is at once meticulous and deeply intuitive. He uses textile-based processes as a form of meditative and political engagement—foregrounding slowness as a method of survival, reflection, and refusal.

His work explores the fragmented conditions of contemporary life under occupation, displacement, and systemic violence. Through repetitive gestures, abstract forms, and restrained palettes, Abdel Hamid transforms embroidery into a conceptual tool—at once intimate and archival. Many of his works bear the weight of personal and collective histories, marked by interruptions, absences, and wounds both literal and symbolic.

Abdel Hamid’s practice resists spectacle, choosing instead to dwell in the quiet, the unfinished, and the fragile. Rather than offering resolution, his works hold space for ambiguity, mourning, and subtle acts of defiance. Through thread and time, Abdel Hamid weaves a language of care, resistance, and deep attention to the unseen.

Resonance presents a series of embroideries tracing the slow growth of a succulent plant observed over several months. Through the practice of embroidery and watching a plant grow on a daily basis, Abdel Hamid abstracts a set of motifs from lived experience. Known for their thick leaves and ability to thrive in arid conditions, succulents embody resilience, adaptability, and quiet intelligence. Their spiral formations optimize survival, maximizing light and channeling moisture to the roots. In these embroidered studies, the plant becomes a metaphor for persistence under pressure and for enduring in resource-scarce environments. With subtlety and care, Abdel Hamid draws parallels between natural survival strategies and the emotional and political landscapes of human life. 

 

Oraib Toukan

Oraib Toukan is an artist whose interdisciplinary practice spans photography, film, writing, and printed matter. Raised and shaped by the landscapes of Jordan and Palestine, her essay films, photo assemblages, and texts delve into relationships between tenderness and horror, materiality and loss, grief and meaning. While exploring the emancipatory potential of images, her gaze often wanders unexpectedly to natural phenomena; cacti, a horse’s neck, or an eyelash. 

In addition to her visual practice, Toukan is a writer and scholar pursuing a research-based practice in Berlin. Her writing draws on the rich lexicon of the Arabic language, challenging dominant narratives with more vernacular understandings of images at large, and images of struggle in particular. Her book Sundry Modernism investigates Palestinian modernism through its cultural and political materials, expanding conversations around modernist practices beyond Eurocentric frameworks. She holds a PhD from Oxford University and has held academic positions at Bard College, New York and Bard College Al Quds, as well as the International Academy of Art, Palestine. Her practice and research continue to shape critical discussions on art, language, politics and poetics.

Influenced by a long-standing dialogue with the Palestinian pedagogue Munir Fasheh on the notion of turbeh (local soil in Arabic) and inspired by the Palestinian writer and lawyer Raja Shehadeh’s writings on sarha (to wander freely with the terrain), Toukan crafts an intimate and haptic approach to images from what she terms, their ‘soil grain’- reading images as topographies, and topographies as images. Things Bigger Than What Can Be Seen–published by Archive Books as part of we refuse-d–explores these symmetries and analogies, and includes the first Arabic translations of some of her essays on struggle and desire. A selection of photographs from the book is presented here, accompanied by notations under the title Index to Living Things.

 

Emily Jacir

Emily Jacir’s interdisciplinary practice encompasses film, photography, installation, performance, sound, and text. Her work explores both personal and collective movement in public space, examining its implications on the physical and social experience of transmediterranean geographies and temporalities. Through rigorous historical and archival research, Jacir has built a layered and resonant body of work rooted in gathering, community, and social affiliations. 

Her commitment extends beyond her artistic practice. In 2014, she founded Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research in Bethlehem, transforming her historic family home into a cultural space for artists, researchers, farmers, archivists, musicians and dancers. This gesture of reclaiming both space and narrative resonates in her practice: rooted, reparative, and generative.

Notes for a Cannon (2016) explores intertwined histories of British colonial rule in Palestine and Ireland. Conceived for the Irish Museum of Modern Art, reflecting on the events which took place there during the 1916 Easter Rising, the work is comprised of a site-specific sound work in the Royal Hospital Kilmainham clock tower and an installation which includes footage Jacir filmed in Acre and in Gaza (2000), drawings, photographs, an 1890 church bell from Armagh, and an Ottoman pocket watch from the same year. The work takes as a point of departure the Clock Tower once at the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem and Dublin’s loss of its own time zone, Dublin Mean Time.. The Jerusalem tower was destroyed by the British in 1922 to align the city with a biblical vision shaped by colonial imagination. Its removal also erased the coexistence of two perceptions of time, replacing it with a single, standardized measure tied to Greenwich.

Delving into the slippages and the standardization of time, Notes for a Cannon investigates how multiple temporalities are lived simultaneously. Jacir constellates the histories of Palestine and Ireland, tracing how these distant geographies are bound by historical, material, and analogical ties. Her sound intervention and installation evoke the fragmented yet systematic nature of imperial control. Rather than a linear narrative, Jacir constructs a tactile, layered, and associative field where everyday objects become markers of temporal and political violence.

 

yasmine eid-sabbagh
In collaboration with Tabara Korka Ndiaye and Ndeye Debo Seck

yasmine eid-sabbagh is an artist and researcher who holds a PhD in Art Theory and Cultural Studies. Her interdisciplinary practice combines research, conversational methods, and (meta)archival practices to examine the agency of photographs and to investigate notions of collectivity, power, and endurance.

Between 2006 and 2011, eid-sabbagh lived in Burj al-Shamali, a Palestinian refugee camp near Tyre, Lebanon, where she developed a long-term project in collaboration with the camp’s inhabitants to negotiate and co-create a potential digital archive, a process that highlighted the challenges and limits of representation, reflecting on memory, displacement, and identity.

Her practice also embraces radical pedagogical initiatives, expanding the role of photography and archival research beyond documentation to become tools for collective agency. eid-sabbagh’s work engages audiences through exhibitions, public lectures, performances, processes of institution building and residencies, inviting reflection on histories that are often marginalized or silenced.

The ongoing research project on solidarity and (the difficulties of) being in the world today is led by yasmine eid-sabbagh, Tabara Korka Ndiaye, and Ndeye Debo Seck. Tabara Korka Ndiaye is a Senegalese independent researcher, curator, artist, and writer. Ndeye Debo Seck is a journalist who also teaches English in middle and high schools in rural Senegal. Their research investigates the historical and contemporary dimensions of Senegalese solidarity with Palestine. While Senegal has historically expressed strong support for Palestinian resistance, the recent silence after October 7 raises questions about the disruption and transformation of this solidarity. Through archival research —including the archives of the Palestinian Embassy in Dakar and the personal archive of its late 35-year ambassador, Abou El-Fahet —and interviews with the solidarity movement in Senegal and fieldwork in Guinea-Bissau, the group maps past and present diplomatic ties and gestures of solidarity. This project seeks to critically examine the current possibilities and limits of solidarity in a shifting political landscape. The project’s first phase at Mathaf is an audio-visual installation in three parts reflecting both historical findings and contemporary dialogues on solidarity.

 

Jumana Manna

Jumana Manna is a Palestinian visual artist and filmmaker whose work explores the intersection of history, politics, and material culture, with a particular focus on the body, land, and the entanglements of power. Working across moving images, sculpture, and installation, Manna’s practice is marked by a poetic and rigorous inquiry into how forms of persistence and resistance are embedded in both objects and living systems.

Working between Jerusalem and Berlin, Manna critically reframes preservation outside its historically institutionalized frameworks across architecture, agriculture and law, highlighting everyday practices of care and communion. Combining archival research, ethnographic observation, and personal narrative, her work is grounded in a research-driven process that centers on re-stagings of quotidian life, creating an archive from below that finds strength, humor and liveliness amidst ruination.

Manna’s practice resists categorization, embracing ambiguity, irony, and vulnerability as tools of critique. Rather than offering didactic statements, her works unfold slowly—foregrounding the complexity of lived experience and the layered textures of cultural mutation and survival. In both content and form, she constructs spaces where memory, fiction, and political urgency coexist.

Her installation Your Time Passes And Mine Has No Ends includes handcrafted banner-flags embroidered with quotations from contemporary Palestinian political prisoners, such as Walid Daqqa and Khaleda Jarrar, hoisted between metal balcony-like structures. The banners’ compositions and colors draw on the history of the mawasim — traditional festive mass celebrations performed through prayer, song, and dance held across the Arab world, and historically in Palestine, where such communal assemblies were ruptured by the Nakba. 

Grounded in the close study of colonial archival documents and literary accounts of the mawasim, Manna revives the historical banner as a communal and liberatory practice, superimposing it with the present-day writings of Palestinian political prisoners that refuse the silencing and fracturing aims of their jailers. Your Time Passes And Mine Has No Ends, attends to the radical spirit of defiance in Palestinian joy. Through the gesture of activating both collective and intimate practices—each carrying within them modes of resilience against erasure—Manna inscribes the experience of isolation onto the collective body,  linking carceral confinement to public memory.