Showcasing the best of emerging contemporary art from Palestine, The Mosaic Rooms present five new works and one special performance by selected artists shortlisted for the A.M. Qattan Foundation’s prestigious Young Artist of the Year 2016.

The artists were challenged to break loose from familiar representations of art created in the Palestinian context, and to explore the notion of repetition and pattern to develop fresh approaches.

Here the artists present six very different contemporary responses to this notion. The pieces range from the deeply personal, a video of a family history that is retold over and over, to the cool forensics of a speculative sci-fi mystery.

Curator Nat Muller says “Pattern Recognition looks at how ‘repetition’ can be used as a strategy to explore the grey zones between fact and fiction, original and copy, ruin and repair. These are pressures that in some form or other Palestinians deal with on a daily basis, from “facts on the ground”, to the viability of a Palestinian state, to the cycle of violence and reconstruction. In the exhibition ‘repetition’ becomes an emancipatory tool for articulating an alternative imaginary that reconstitutes old and familiar patterns in the representation of Palestine.”

The Young Artist of the Year Award is a biennial award which provides a platform to celebrate emerging artists from Palestine, early in their career. The shortlisted artists worked intensively with curator Nat Muller to develop their projects in response to this year’s theme. The works vary across media from video, installation, to sound performance. Asma Ghamem’s sound piece can be experienced in a one-off live performance on 24 February.

The outcomes are rooted in the artists’ individual experiences of Palestine, where geographies, histories and identities are fragmented. However the works play out preoccupations – displacement, resistance, the blurring of truth – which resonate in today’s wider world.

The exhibited artists are: Inas Halabi (first prize winner) Somar Sallam (second prize winner), Asma Ghanem (third prize winner), Noor Abed, Majd Masri and Ruba Salameh.

There will be an associated programme of events running throughout the exhibition.

About the curator: 

Nat Muller is an independent curator and critic. Her main fields of expertise are: contemporary art from the Middle East; the politics of image representation; media art; art and food. Her writing has been published internationally and she has written numerous catalogue and monographic essays on artists from the Middle East. She has curated exhibitions and other projects in Europe and the Middle East, as well as video and film screenings for festivals including Rotterdam’s International Film Festival, Norwegian Short Film Festival and Video D.U.M.B.O. In 2015 she was Associate Curator for the Delfina Foundation’s Politics of Food Program in London. Nat is contributing editor at Ibraaz.

For more information about the exhibiting artists see the exhibition press release.

Press enquiries: contact press [at] mosaicrooms.org

Opening in January 2017

© Image: Inas Halabi, Mnemosyne, video, 2016.