"Across these years, I have been preoccupied with how knowledge takes form and how material objects become legible within institutional systems,” says Hazem. "Whether I work with archaeological images, maps or architectural debris, I am thinking about the structures through which objects pass as they move from one context to another. Once removed from their original environment, they are translated into a different language, often shaped by curatorial or archival frameworks that impose particular hierarchies of value. My practice seeks to make those translation processes visible.”
- Hazem Harb
For the inaugural edition of Art Basel Qatar, Tabari Artspace presents a solo booth dedicated to Palestinian visual artist Hazem Harb. Harb’s project mobilises archaeology as a critical framework through which to examine displacement, circulation, and the epistemic violence embedded in the production of historical knowledge. Drawing together works produced across distinct moments in his practice, from 2018 to the present day, the presentation brings collage and installation into dialogue around a sustained concern with how objects, images and people are extracted, transported and reclassified across time and space.
Harb’s engagement with archaeology emerged early in his practice, notably in works produced in 2018 and first exhibited at Jaou Tunis. In Reformulated Archaeology (2018), a series from which several works are presented here, Harb layers fragments of landscape, anatomical forms and remediated original images of artefacts absorbed from locations across Palestine, many Neolithic figurines. Stripped of colour and detached from their original sites, these elements are recomposed into dense pictorial structures that examine the relationship between people, place and the institutional management of culture. Artefacts circulate here in ways that mirror their encounter within Western museum systems, catalogued and displayed through institutional frameworks in cities such as London, New York and Paris. These forms register the transformation of cultural heritage into objects of classification, rendered legible through colonial regimes of knowledge. Harb’s compositions make this process visible by collapsing geographic, bodily and material references into a single field, foregrounding the mechanics of extraction, ownership and access. Pieces of these figurines -torsos and faces - recur as central motifs, layered and encircled by thorn-like forms that suggest containment and restriction. Their biomorphic appearance, often evoking viral or bacterial structures, frames imperial extraction as a pathological condition embedded within social and institutional systems. Harb treats the past as a field shaped by discontinuity, power and revision: a genealogical approach (see Foucault) that refuses linear historical narratives in favour of fragmented, contested accounts. This concern with the politics of representation extends to the cartographic archive. In Fragmentation (2024), Harb slices, layers and repeats a map from Palestine’s pre-Nakba history, subjecting it to processes of reordering and interruption that produce visual distortion. Maps function here not as neutral instruments but as technologies of governance that impose borders, regulate movement and reconfigure space according to imperial logics. Through fragmentation and reassembly, Harb exposes this large-scale map as a site of inherited violence and contested authority, reinserting human movement, memory and instability into cartographic systems that conventionally erase them.
Returning to archaeological enquiry eight years later, Harb’s newly produced Future Archaeology (2025) adopts a speculative approach. The works are produced from fragments of tiles retrieved from Palestine’s former airport, a site that has since become an inaccessible military zone. Entering the site with a fellow artist, Harb collected remnants from a fountain designed by a Moroccan architect, later subjecting these materials to processes borrowed from architectural practice - scanning, cataloguing and amplification. These fragments were enlarged and recombined with their original forms drawing attention to the act of documentation and its role in conferring value. The airport functions here as a charged architectural and symbolic space. As a site designed to facilitate mobility and transnational connection, its abandonment reflects a broader condition of suspended movement and exile. Harb treats these fragments as potential evidence of interrupted futures, positioning them within a speculative timeframe that asks how histories of displacement will be read and interpreted in years to come.
At the centre of the curation is And In-Between (2024) a sculptural installation composed of layered and enlarged 3D-printed keys. Replicating the key to Harb’s family home in Gaza and the key to his own apartment, both destroyed through successive acts of violence, the work collapses generational time into a single spatial field. The key functions here as a personal object but also a collective symbol, widely associated within Palestinian communities with ownership, return and deferred justice. Through repetition and accumulation, the work conveys displacement as an ongoing structural condition rather than a singular historical event.