Hazem Harb: Not There, Yet Felt
Hazem Har, Hollyland Part 2 (Marsaba Monastery, Bethlehem), Letters in acrylic plexiglass mounted upon archival C-P fine art photography paper on MDF wood, 2021, 105 x 235 cm, Nisreen Bajis Collection
Rooted in personal history and collective memory, Hazem Harb’s practice explores how exile leaves its mark on architectural form and cultural identity. Born in Gaza and based in Dubai, Harb’s visual language frequently references architectural ruins and archival imagery that evoke the fragility of built environments and the precariousness of home. At once intimate and expansive, his collages, sculptures, and installations explore the physical and symbolic structures shaped by war and exile presenting them not merely as remnants of destruction, but as foundations for belonging and reconstruction.
His April 2025 solo exhibition, Not There, Yet Felt, is a reflection on the aesthetics of loss, through the lens of architecture – as both a physical framework and as an emotional terrain. The solo show at Tabari Art Space centres around both literal and metaphorical layers of history and memory embedded within the walls of his ancestral home in Gaza – a residence held by his family for over 120 years, now reduced to rubble.
Collage works made from photographs taken by a journalist at the bombed site reveal fragments of peeling paint dislodged by explosions. Faded hues – soft pinks, deep burgundy, dusty blue – resurface like ghosts of generations past, bringing unexpected moments of beauty to a scene of devastation. Mounted on aluminium-coated plywood, silhouetted cutouts of the artist’s own profile glint subtly against the flesh-coloured walls. Above, a flickering neon sign reads Hope Is Power. The message is resolutely optimistic, yet as the electricity pulses in and out, it becomes a poignant metaphor for both the fragility and resilience of belief in a better tomorrow.
“I am trying as a human being to create art as a universal language,” Harb reflects. “To talk about it from my own perspective. And yet here, there is a distance, a disembodiment of myself – I am sharing my personal pain but also removing myself from it.”
Every portrait in the new series is a silhouette of the artist, yet many appear obscured or ghostly. His Gauze series, which began during his father’s captivity in 2024, reappears here with the final piece in the series. It shows a full-body self-portrait made from delicate medical gauze. It is an ephemeral form that nevertheless conveys great strength, like a phoenix rising from the ashes.
The show however, is more than a linear presentation of a new body of work. In a separate room, early pieces created when Harb was as a student in Rome two decades previously strike surprising parallels and suggest a conceptual foundation for his current practice. While not self-portraits, the abstract forms feel familiar in both shape and pallette; as though time has peeled back layers to expose them anew. Here, time and geography collapse, reminding us of the continued longing for a home that will never be realised. In both past and present, the romanticism of return and the impossibility of arrival remain central themes.
At the heart of the exhibition lies a pile of 3D-printed keys—exact replicas of the key to his family’s demolished home in Gaza, and the key to his own contemporary apartment, also lost to bombardment. Juxtaposed side by side, these keys speak of generational trauma. They suggest continuity despite rupture, anchoring memory and loss within a broader, collective consciousness.
In the Dubai Collection, Harb is represented by a work that similarly bridges past and present. An archival image of the Marsaba Monastery in Bethlehem is overlaid with the word HOLLYLAND in bold acrylic plexiglass. Referencing both Hollywood’s iconic signage and the designation of his homeland as the Holy Land, the work holds dual meaning: a reflection on the commodification and distortion of cultural identity, and a speculative imagining of what the land might have become, had history not taken its violent course.
Harb’s work is deeply conceptual and poetic; and in Not There, Yet Felt, poetry appears in written form as well. A snippet of the poem that accompanies the exhibition reads:
There is no arrival, only movement. No ending, only a pulse. A rhythm of what was, What is, What refuses to disappear.
Through this body of work, Harb reaffirms his position not only as an artist chronicling the rupture and resonance of Palestinian identity, but as a vital voice in contemporary art. In his hands, debris becomes material, memory becomes medium, and architecture becomes both wound and witness. His practice continues to offer an urgent invitation: to reflect, to remember, and to imagine in a world that is constantly being rebuilt, both physically and emotionally. In the Dubai Collection and beyond, Harb’s work resounds with a quiet strength one that upholds the resilience of memory, even when the walls have crumbled.