Hazem Harb regularly employs collage to synthesise ideas from disparate cultures and times, forming new meanings. In Hollyland (2019), Harb layers acrylic lettering spelling out “Hollyland”:, rendered in Hollywood’s ubiquitous squared typeface, over an archival photograph of Bethlehem. Hollywood’s typography, a visual code that denotes celebrity and projects American culture as a global culture, takes on new meaning through Harb’s reworking.
Hollyland Part II extends this enquiry, applying the same visual logic to a wider constellation of sites. Across three works—Mar Saba Monastery, Bethlehem (2021), The Dead Sea, Jericho (2021), and View from the Foot of Mount Carmel, Haifa (2021)—Harb shifts attention to places embedded with spiritual, historical, and geopolitical weight. Through collage, these locations are re-situated within global visual economies that have long privileged Western cultural centres.
By foregrounding regional landscapes and landmarks, from the fifth-century Mar Saba monastery on the outskirts of Bethlehem to the layered terrain of Mount Carmel, Harb interrogates how value is assigned to place and how certain geographies are rendered peripheral. The works unsettle dominant cultural hierarchies and insist on the presence of other narratives, histories, and systems of meaning that continue to shape how space is seen and understood.
