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 both 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 method 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.

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.

TA: Connecting these works is your installation of keys, And In-Between (2024). What does this work represent for you?

HH: It brings together two keys, one from my family home in Gaza and the other from my own apartment, both of which were destroyed. By enlarging and layering the keys through 3D printing, I treated them as architectural forms rather than simple objects. The piece positions private memory alongside collective experience. Across Palestinian communities, the key carries a symbolic resonance because it holds the idea of return and the continuation of a future that has not yet been realised. Through repetition, the work reflects on the way displacement moves across generations. It is a condition that gathers weight over time rather than receding into the past.