We are thrilled to present ‘The Deluge and the Tree’ a group exhibition featuring some of the most compelling voices to emerge from Palestine.
What happens after the storm? How do we remember, mourn, and continue? These are some of the questions posed by the artists in this exhibition, whose relations to Palestine vary from the complicated distance of diaspora to the violence and strangeness of living with occupation, and the varied challenges of mundane, everyday life.
Drawing from Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan’s poem ‘The Deluge and the Tree’, which illustrates a tree weathering a terrible storm, to which both its green leaves and the birds return, our upcoming exhibition seeks to highlight the nuances and diversity of ideas of both memory and place from Palestinian perspectives amidst ongoing calamities.
Presenting an array of mediums, including installations, videos, music, photography, and drawings, the exhibition unveils the diverse talents of:
Firas Shehadeh: videos, prints, performance
Nerian Keywan: animation/video, graphic design
Dina Nazmi Khorchid: textile projection installation
Sarah Risheq: video installation
Shadi Habib Allah: video
Bint Mbareh: sound installation and performance,
sound installation featuring works by Zahra Malkani, Syma Tariq, Eli Wewentru, and Bint Mbareh
About the artists
Firas Shehadeh
Firas Shehadeh (Amman, Jordan, 1988). Lives and works between Barcelona and Amman. By the use of images, sounds and public interventions in his projects he explores his relationship with the space and the influence of authority in altering the collective consciousness and identity. His interest in the socio-economic influences in falsifying historical narratives and the alienation of the individual in a nebulous society, comes from his experience as a resident in a Palestinian refugee camp in Amman and his current refugee status in Spain. He finished a degree in architecture in 2008, then he worked as an artistic director, producer and graphic designer in various projects. His work has been exhibited in Morocco, Palestine, Spain, Germany and Jordan. In 2014 he was selected for the 64th Berlinale - 9th Forum Expanded and in 2015 for the Espai Cub - La Capella, as part of BCN Producció program (Barcelona City Council).
Nerian Keywan is a Palestinian visual artist currently based in London. With a background in Visual communication, Philosophy, History of Art, and 6 years of experience in motion design she obtained her master's degree in Animation from the Royal College of Art (RCA), London in 2023. In her practice, Nerian specialises in animation and illustration, mixing between 2D and 3D aesthetics, her approach explores themes of nonsense; chaos, mundanity, and selfhood amongst others. Her master's dissertation: "The Urgency of Nonsense in the Palestinian Context" provides a critical read into the current Palestinian art scene, and explores issues of conventions and audience that lead to creative limitations. Simultaneously, it discusses creative nonsense, animation, and contemporary Arab internet culture, as a call for artists and institutions to minimize the gap between the artist and their audience.
Dina Khorchid
Dina Khorchid is a visual artist working primarily with printed and woven textiles. She explores themes of identity politics, displacement, domesticity, land and memory access, to construct narratives of place and connections to lost bodies, in relation to her lived experience as a third-generation Palestinian refugee, a daughter of a disappeared casualty of the Gulf War and an artist.
Dina’s work was featured in group shows in the USA, UAE and Lebanon, including exhibitions at Field Projects, Art Dubai and the Institute for Palestine Studies. She completed a Master of Fine Arts in Textiles at the Rhode Island School of Design (2023), where she was a recipient of the Society of Presidential Fellows Award and a Bachelors in Visual Communication from the American University of Sharjah (2009). Dina was awarded Artist-in-Residence at the Vermont Studio Center (September 2023), Fellow at Ashkal Alwan’s Home Workspace Program (HWP, 2018-2019) and is an alumnus of the Salama bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Emerging Artists Fellowship (SEAF, cohort of 2016-2017).
Sarah Risheq is a Palestinian-Syrian Amman-based writer, editor, and story-teller/gatherer. currently, they are interested in the intersections and interconnectedness between body, memory, forgetfulness, liberation, fugitivity, land, the archive, and futurisms. They enjoy formulating questions that allow me to build worlds and burn others. especially questions that allow them to widen their sensibilities and expand their imagination.
Born in Jerusalem, Palestine, Shadi Habib Allah received a BFA from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in 2003 and an MFA from Columbia University in 2010. He attended residencies at Gasworks and Delfina in London. He was the 2012 recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and the 2018 Mophradat’s Consortium Commission grant. His work has been exhibited at the Palestine c/o Venice at the Venice Biennale, Art Statements Art Basel 43, the 13th Sharjah Biennial and the New Museum Triennial amongst others. Exhibitions include ‘Measured Volumes’ at the Hammer Museum, ‘Put to Rights’ at the Renaissance Society, Chicago, ‘Empire State’, curated by Norman Rosenthal & Alex Gartenfeld, at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, and at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris; ‘Frozen Lakes. His Films have screened at the 69th Berlinale Expanded Forum, Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, Oberhausen Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Hamburg Film Fesitval, Courtisane Festival, Belgium and the 40th Norwegian Film Festival. He lives and works between Palestine and Berlin.
Bint Mbareh works with all formats of sound (radio, live, installation and many others) and is driven by the superpowers of communal singing human and more than human. She conducted research initially to combat the myth of water scarcity pushed by Israeli settler colonialism. The songs that she learned helped communities summon rain, and at their core helped people build a relationship with their environment, decide what time of year it is, communally determine how to share resources, mainly the resource of time, fairly. Bint Mbareh makes music and sound today because she believes these uses can still be evoked, rather than remembered. She now studies death and rebirth as analogies for necessary communal upheavals, still looking for these significations in Palestinian landscape, now in the shrine of Nabi-Musa (AS), the prophet Moses. She has been a practicing artist since 2018.
She has performed at Mophradat's Read the Room festival (March 2022), at the Hiya Live Sessions in Dalston’s Jago (May 2022) , She co-founded Exist Festival in Palestine in 2019, She was Café OTO's Youth Music Resident for 2021, She has shown sound and object work at Chapter Gallery in Cardiff, curated by SWAY Barry, Qanat, and LE18 in Marrakech in August 2022. She has performed at the Lincoln Centre in New York as part of Unsound Festival's December 2022 Weavings curated by Nicolás Jaar. She has shown sound work at the Mardin Bienali in May of 2022 invited by Adwait Singh, as well as at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh in July 2022, invited by Sakiya and Cooking Sections. She represented Exist Festival in 2022's edition of Tehran Contemporary Sounds. She was Mophradat's Art Time Resident at BUDA Kortrijk's NEXT Festival in 2021. She has performed several times in London's Shubbak and AWAN Festivals.
