Shadi Harouni
I collect facts and fictions on how power attempts to erase and abolish, and on the kinds of ingenuity and strategy the individual employs to resist full erasure. I’m interested in this history of resistance formally, emotionally, and politically. I dissect and imitate these strategies in the form of architectural interventions, sculptures, photographs, prints, and videos. My research centers on the metaphysics and absurdities of hope alive in dead bodies, forbidden objects and forgotten spaces.
A “forestation” project undertaken to erase the graves of three political martyrs, a factory built to conceal books in its foundations, objects buried wrapped in plastic in the hope of some future retrieval that is never to come. I look for them in abandoned factories and mountain quarries, guided there by a personal history that is forever entangled with stone, metal and myth.
View the artist's exhibition here.