• Lines of Extraction.

    In the Studio with Hazem Harb

    On archaeology, displacement, and the structures of historical narration.

  • "Growing up, I became aware of how images of Palestine circulated in ways that were incomplete, partial or shaped by an external gaze. Collage allowed me to reclaim and reconfigure the image, to take it apart and interrogate its assumptions." 

     

    -Hazem Harb

    Ahead of his presentation with Tabari Artspace at Art Basel Qatar in February 2026, we speak with Palestinian visual artist Hazem Harb about the evolution of his practice, his sustained engagement with archaeology, and the new works that anchor his presentation in Doha. Harb, who works across collage, sculpture and installation, examines how displacement, circulation and institutional classification shape the way histories are constructed and consumed. His studio practice engages archives, architectural remnants and material fragments, developing layered visual fields in which personal and collective memory converge.

     

    Tabari Artspace: You have maintained a steady commitment to collage throughout your practice. What first drew you to this way of working and why has it become such a central method for you?

     

    Hazem Harb: Collage is a conceptual and structural necessity in my art. Growing up, I became aware of how images of Palestine circulated in ways that were incomplete, partial or shaped by an external gaze. Collage allowed me to reclaim and reconfigure the image, to take it apart and interrogate its assumptions. By dismantling and reassembling fragments, I create conditions where new relationships surface. It is an approach that acknowledges rupture as a lived condition. Collage accepts that histories are carried in pieces that rarely align. For me, this approach carries an ethical dimension because it resists the idea of a unified or authoritative narrative. Instead, it makes room for instability, ambiguity and reinterpretation. Over time, collage has become the spine of my practice because it supports a mode of thinking that responds to the discontinuities of displacement and the complexities of visual knowledge.


     

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    Hazem Harb, Temporary Museum. For Palestine, 2021–22, video, Maraya Art Centre, Sharjah
  • TA: Your project for Art Basel Qatar draws together works from 2018 to the present. What connects these different moments...

    TA: Your project for Art Basel Qatar draws together works from 2018 to the present. What connects these different moments in your practice?

     

    HH: Across these years, I have been preoccupied with how knowledge takes form and how material objects become legible within institutional systems. 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. When I look back at the work from 2018, I see the beginnings of this enquiry, while the recent works extend that thinking into a speculative realm. The questions are consistent, but the forms have expanded in scale, complexity and material vocabulary.

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  • TA: The 2018 series Reformulated Archaeology, how did this work begin, and what questions were you asking at the time?...

    TA: The 2018 series Reformulated Archaeology, how did this work begin, and what questions were you asking at the time?

     

    HH: The series began with my close study of photographs of archaeological artefacts from sites across Palestine, many of them small figurines from the Neolithic period. I stripped the images of colour to remove the illusion of neutrality or completeness. Once isolated, these forms could be examined as cultural objects that have been repeatedly displaced. I combined them with fragments of landscape and anatomy to create arrangements that emphasised their unsettled condition. These artefacts migrate through museums and archives in cities that bear no relation to the sites from which they were taken. When their fragments are recomposed in new constellations, the systems that govern their classification become more visible. The thorn-like structures in the compositions developed from my interest in the violence of extraction, how it marks both land and body, and how it reshapes cultural memory through processes of removal and containment.

     

  • Victims of a Map (2025)

  • In Victims of a Map, I worked with historical maps of Palestine to examine how cartography has been used to organise land and, by extension, people. The work responds to the erasure of villages, towns and neighbourhoods from official records

    TA: Your recent work, Victims of a Map (2025) turns to the cartographic archive. How does mapping function within your broader concerns around history and representation?

     

    HH: Mapping is never a neutral act. Maps present themselves as instruments of description, yet they are fundamentally tools of decision-making. Borders, names and omissions are the result of political processes that determine what is recorded and what disappears. In Victims of a Map, I worked with historical maps of Palestine to examine how cartography has been used to organise land and, by extension, people. The work responds to the erasure of villages, towns and neighbourhoods from official records, and to the violence embedded in processes of reclassification.

    I reassembled these maps into abstract figural forms that suggest a human landscape shaped by occupation. The bodies are stand-ins for collective presence, bearing the weight of administrative decisions that have material consequences. By inscribing the names of erased locations onto transparent glass, I wanted text and image to occupy the same unstable space. Names float, overlap and slip, mirroring the precarity of memory when it is subjected to bureaucratic systems. Through this layering, the work exposes mapping as a structure of power that produces loss while claiming authority. What interests me is what maps show, what they actively conceal, and how these visual systems continue to shape historical narration and political reality.

  • TA: Your new series, Future Archaeology (2025) signals a return to archaeological ideas, but through a different lens. Can you...

    Pictured: Gaza Airport, courtesy of Politics Today, 2022

     

    TA: Your new series, Future Archaeology (2025) signals a return to archaeological ideas, but through a different lens. Can you describe how this project began?

     

    HH: The project began when I gained rare access to Palestine’s former airport, now an inaccessible military zone. The site carries a symbolic charge because it once represented mobility, exchange and possibility. There, I found fragments from a fountain designed by a Moroccan architect, and these remnants became the core of the work. I collected them and approached them as future artefacts, scanning, enlarging and cataloguing the pieces using tools drawn from architecture. By amplifying their scale and pairing them with their original forms, I wanted to place emphasis on the act of documentation. Recording an object produces meaning and can transform debris into evidence. This series operates in a speculative register. It imagines how future archaeologists might interpret these fragments and what these interpretations might reveal about histories shaped by suspension and forced immobility.

     
  • TA: Beyond the fair, where can we see your work right now? HH: My work is currently on view at...

    Pictured: Hazem Harb, Beyond Memory series, 2012, British Museum [permanent collection]

     

    TA: Beyond the fair, where can we see your work right now? 

     

    HH:  My work is currently on view at the British Museum in London and at the Seoul Museum of Art as part of the group exhibition Proximities. I also have work included in Observers of Change at the Etihad Museum in the UAE, drawn from the Barjeel Art Foundation collection, which highlights significant artistic contributions from across the Arab world. On 30 January, the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale in Saudi Arabia will open. The biennale considers movement, pause, and transformation as defining conditions of contemporary life. The work I present there examines how material and form register these dynamics as histories are carried, reconfigured, and reread.