Samia Halaby
‘Untitled’
Over her nearly-60-year career, the Jerusalem-born artist has established herself as a leading proponent of contemporary abstract art. Halaby’s work, the biennale catalogue states, “draws inspiration from nature and cultural movements such as early Islamic architecture and the Soviet avant-garde,” to “translate movement, light, and rhythm into vibrant compositions that merge modernist abstraction with her idiosyncratic visual language.” She has 11 works on show at the biennale, including this untitled piece from 1977 — one of three works on paper from her “mid-1970s experiment with optical effects and illusions, using limited color palettes.”
Halaby, the catalogue notes, “believes that new approaches to painting can transform our ways of seeing and thinking — not only within aesthetics, but also as a way to discover new perspectives for advancements in teaching, technology, and society at large.”
Hazem Harb
‘Gauze’ series
The Gaza-born artist and photographer works mainly with collage to explore identity, exile, and “the physical and emotional consequences of displacement.” He presents his “Gauze” series at the biennale. Harb often used the material as his canvas in early works, seeing it as “a symbol of resistance amid the suffering of his people,” the catalogue states, noting that gauze has been made in Gaza for centuries. In these works created in 2023 and 2024, he returns to it as “a means to shed light on the ongoing plight of Palestinians and Gazans.” Harb arranges pieces of gauze on cardboard, “forming figures that resemble mutilated or fallen human bodies … In this context, the gauze references the kafan — the white cloth traditionally used to shroud bodies before a Muslim burial, evoking the many such wrapped corpses in Gaza.”
Nour Mobarak
‘Dafne Phono’
As a teenager, the Cairo-born Lebanese artist’s ambition was to be a singer, and she had classical voice training lessons for several years. She also grew up in a household in which several languages were spoken, some of which she did not fully understand. Both of those facts have greatly influenced her artistic practice. In this large-scale installation, Mobarak reinterprets the world’s first known opera, “La Dafne.” The opera’s original score has been lost, but the libretto is still available. Mobarak uses this as “the jump-off point” for her multichannel sound installation, “animated by 15 ‘singing’ sculptures of mycelium, the ‘roots’ of fungi.” The artist had the libretto translated into English, but also into some of the oldest and rarest languages in the world, including the whistled language Silbo Gomero and click language !Xoon. “Mobarak draws parallels between fungal networks and linguistic systems: both repeat, decay and regenerate,” the catalogue states.
Rand Abdul Jabbar
‘A Tale Before the Deluge’
In this new installation, commissioned for the biennale, the UAE-based Iraqi artist “turns to the flood story at the heart of the ‘Epic of Gilgamesh,’ the world’s oldest surviving narrative poem,” in which “immortality is found in the enduring sites of collective life — the temple, date-palm grove, clay pit, and city. Those places, where labor and devotion converge, form the foundation of Abdul Jabbar’s work.” The freestanding installation consists of drawings (one of which is shown here) stretched across wooden molds, sourced from Mexican brickmakers. “At its core, the work calls forth the brickmaker and bricklayer as storyteller,” the catalogue states. “Abdul Jabbar casts these figures as custodians of ancestral knowledge, reminding us that every fragment of earth carries an imprint of the past into the present.”
Yazan Khalil
‘We learned our language from our dreams’
In this new video installation commissioned for the biennale, the Palestinian artist uses monitors of different sizes with objects attached, with each screen displaying videos, photographs, drawings and texts. “In our era of AI systems … it can be argued that language has been alienated from its sensory sphere of lived, affective, and poetic experiences, performing as mechanical abstractions on screens and devices,” the catalogue states. “Khalil’s interest does not lie in AI as much as in the way language is mediated, negotiated, and reclaimed in our day-to-day … the work recodes the everyday … Of equal interest is the concept of the glitch … the installation is read in its entirety by moving around to piece together its fragmented and dispersed facets.”
