Unsettled Earth: Artists in Conversation

This session convenes artists from Unsettled Earth to reflect on how their practices respond to the enduring structures of settler colonial violence in the region. Moayed Abou Ammouna’s photographs document the persistence of life in Gaza against the systemic machines of death and destruction. Bayan Abu Nahla’s watercolor traces the transformation of land from a source of sustenance to a site of scarcity and violence. Sarah Zeryab’s film essay thinks with the site of the Palestinian refugee camp—tracing the trajectory of peasant turned refugee turned revolutionary. Basyma Saad’s drawing connects imagery from olive harvests and mythical figuration to speak to the colonial destruction of agrarian life and the continuities of resistance that persist across the extended geographies of Palestine and Lebanon.

The session opens with introductory notes from Art historian Angela Harutyunyan, situating the Unsettled Earth exhibition in relation to questions on the political economy of art-making and cultural practice amidst catastrophe.

Angela Harutyunyan is a professor of Contemporary Art and Theory at the Berlin University of the Arts. In 2011-2023 she taught at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon where she also led the art history program. She is one of the founding editors of ARTMargins published by MIT Press.

Bayan Abu Nahla is a visual artist from Gaza. Passionate about paper drawing, manual techniques, comics, and digital art, she has been practicing art since childhood. She employs it as a tool to document her experiences and as a means of self-exploration.

Basyma Saad is an artist and writer born in Beirut. Her work explores notions of mourning, spontaneity, and surplus, through film, performance, and sculpture, alongside essays and fiction.

Moayed Abu Ammouna is a Palestinian refugee born in Gaza City, Palestine. He works in the field of photography and filmmaking.  He received a BA in Media (Specialization of Radio and Television) from Al-Aqsa University. His work considers questions on land, the conditions of refuge and the uprooting of communities.

Sarah Zeryab is a Palestinian artist whose practice deals with rupture, exile and resistance. Working with film, video and sound, she explores the material, affective and aesthetic manifestations of these conditions through non-linear constellations of fragmented text, image and sound. Zeryab’s practice is grounded in the fraught relationship between the Palestinian refugee camp, stolen land and revolution.