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Bio:
Khalil Rabah currently lives and works in Ramallah, Palestine. Born in 1961, he studied fine arts and architecture at the University of Texas. Rabah has taught architecture at Birzeit University, and Fine Arts at Bezalel Academy, Jerusalem.. He taught at the Department of Fine Art at the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem from 1997-2000. Rabah artistic practice ranges from installations to live and performance art. His installations have used objects emblematic of Palestinian identity such as olive trees, olive oil, stones, and silk embroidery threads. He has participated in major international group exhibitions such as in Arnolfini Museum, Bristol, as well as several biennials: Gwangju (1995), Sydney (1998), Sao Paulo (1998), Istanbul (2005), Liverpool (2008), Venice (2009), Sharjah (2010), Mori Art Museum (2012) and dOCUMENTA (13) (2012). He has had numerous international solo exhibitions like 50.320 names at Brunei Gallery of SOAS, University of London (2007), Beirut Art Center (2012), and at E-Flux, New York. Rabah is the founder of The Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind and a co-founder of Al Ma'mal Foundation for Contemporary Art in Jerusalem and ArtSchool Palestine in London.
Mona Hatoum’s poetic and political oeuvre is realised in a diverse and often unconventional range of media, including installations, sculpture, video, photography and works on paper. Hatoum started her career making visceral video and performance work in the 1980s that focused with great intensity on the body. Since the beginning of the 1990s, her work moved increasingly towards large-scale installations that aim to engage the viewer in conflicting emotions of desire and revulsion, fear and fascination. In her singular sculptures, Hatoum has transformed familiar, every-day, domestic objects such as chairs, cots and kitchen utensils into things foreign, threatening and dangerous. Even the human body is rendered strange in works such as 'Corps étranger' (1994) or ‘Deep Throat’ (1996), installations that use endoscopic journeys through the interior landscape of the artist’s own body. In Homebound (2000) and Sous Tension (1999) Hatoum uses an assemblage of household furniture wired up with an audibly active electric current – combine a sense of threat with a surrealist sense of humour to create works that draw the viewer in on both an emotive and intellectual level. In smaller sculptures such as Traffic (2004) and Twins (2006) Hatoum uses found materials, rich with patina and laden with personal resonance, to create poetic, beguiling works on an intimate scale. Mona Hatoum was born into a Palestinian family in Beirut, Lebanon in 1952 and now lives and works in London and Berlin. She has participated in numerous important group exhibitions including The Turner Prize (1995), Venice Biennale (1995 and 2005), Documenta XI, Kassel, 2002 and Biennale of Sydney (2006). Solo exhibitions include Centre Pompidou, Paris (1994), Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1997), The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (1998), Castello di Rivoli, Turin (1999), Tate Britain, London (2000), Hamburger Kunsthalle, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Magasin 3, Stockholm (2004) and Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2005). Recent exhibitions include Measures of Entanglement, UCCA, Beijing (2009), Interior Landscape, Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice (2009), Witness, Beirut Art Center, Beirut (2010), Le Grand Monde, Fundaciòn Marcelino Botìn, Santander (2010). Mona Hatoum has been awarded the prestigious 2011 Joan Miró Prize and most recently exhibited at the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona in June 2012.
Tarek Al-Ghoussein was born in Kuwait in 1962. His parents are Palestinian exiles, and the artist lived in the United States, Morocco, and Japan during his childhood. Al-Ghoussein received his undergraduate degree in photography from New York University and a MA from the University of New Mexico. He currently teaches at the American University of Sharjah, but before entering into academia was a photojournalist. Both Al-Ghoussein's personal and professional background play a prominent role in his artistic output, which deals with his Palestinian identity through a photography that appears to be documentarian, but is in fact fictional. Al-Ghoussein has exhibited internationally at such venues as the Royal Museum of Photography, Copenhagen (2003); Sharjah Biennial, United Arab Emirates (2003, 2005, 2009); Aperture Gallery, New York (2005); Singapore Biennial (2008); and United Arab Emirates Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2009). Major solo exhibitions have been held at the Manarat Al Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi (2009), and Sharjah Art Museum (2010). Al-Ghoussein currently lives and works in Sharjah.
Ayman Baalbaki was born in 1975 in the South of Lebanon, and his practice reflects the realities of the Lebanese Civil war which he has lived through. Having been forced to leave his village and relocate to Beirut to the neighborhood of Wadi Abu Jamil, which has been replaced with the glitzy Downtown area, his background has greatly influenced his work. His paintings reflect the aspects of his life as a refugee in Beirut and the reconstruction efforts in the post-war era (or the de-construction for that matter). After completing a degree at the Lebanese University’s Institute of Fine Arts, Baalbaki left for Paris where he continued his studies at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs and obtained his PHD. He has exhibited widely in the Middle East and Europe; recent solo shows include “Switzerland It Ain’t" ("Ceci N’est Pas La Suisse") at Rose Issa Projects, London (2009); “Apocalyptic Transfiguration”, at the Agial Art Gallery, Beirut (2008); “Ici est Ailleurs”, Agial Gallery, Beirut, Lebanon (2006); “Thirty: Ayman Baalbaki and Sheelagh Colcough”, Studio 4-11, Belfast (2005); “CM3”, Cité Internationale Universitaire, Paris (2003); and “Contemporary Art Encounter: Imagining the Book”, Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Egypt (2002). Upcoming exhibitions include a solo show at the Luce Gallery in Turin, entitled “Ciel Chargé de Fleurs” and Monica de Cardenas Galleria, Milan. Baalbaki currently lives and works in Beirut.
Exhibitions/Projects:
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Affiliations/Residencies/Fellowships/Workshops:
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