Biography
Hazem Harb was born in Gaza, studied at the European Institute of Design in Rome where he received his MFA, and has lived and worked in the UAE for many years. His practice begins in the archive — photographs, negatives, maps, ephemera collected from the fringes of official history — and proceeds through collage assembled with geometric precision. The methodology is borrowed from early twentieth-century collagists who used the technique to make sense of catastrophe; Harb uses it for the same reason, working with material from a place that has been carved up and redrawn many times and whose story cannot be separated from the global forces that produced it. His work is held in the British Museum, the Centre Pompidou and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He has participated in Global(e) Resistance at the Centre Pompidou, Observers of Change at the Etihad Museum in collaboration with the Barjeel Art Foundation, and Proximities at the Seoul Museum of Art.