Born Gaza, Palestine, 1980. Palestinian-Italian

Hazem Harb’s trajectory spans over several decades, maintaining an unwavering dialogue with his symbolically charged homeland. Moving from Gaza to Rome to study for his Master of Fine Arts degree from the European Institute of Design, and then on to the UAE, Harb has learnt to navigate life as a liminal. Knowing that his place of origin can never be just a ‘land’, the artist unleashes an ever-evolving repertoire of artistic techniques to negotiate a space that has been carved up and redrawn many times.

His art is at once subsumed in a deep locality, fuelled by personal insight, and entangled in conversations that cannot be easily separated from the global arena. His practice is intended more as visual excavation than romanticisation of the Other, and through it, one can explore the paradoxical and pressured relations between people and places. Steering away from nostalgia and the fetishisation of displacement, he draws from academia and architecture, as well as European art traditions, to negotiate an axis of complex social and cultural relations; built and natural environments, longing and belonging. Much like the artists of the early 20th century who, through the deployment of collage, healed from the trauma of the First World War by binding together everyday and artistic experiences, Harb succeeds in materialising complex and unfamiliar terrain.

Operating as a researcher, by collecting and synthesising archives of rarified ephemera including photographs, negatives and maps, Harb mediates his materials in a manner which dismantles them from a static space. Through a process of collage, layered down with geometric precision, he stitches visual artefacts together and forms fresh constructions that invite unheard discourses and a historical rethinking. 

Hazem Harb is represented by Tabari Artspace and is a commissioned artist for Beyond: Artist Commissions, Abu Dhabi Art 2021. 

Born in 1953, Najat Makki is the first Emirati woman to obtain a PhD in the Philosophy of Art from the College of Fine Arts in Cairo for her research in coins, after obtaining her BA and MA degrees in the field of relief sculpture and metal.

She is a pioneer of the fine arts movement in the UAE, a founding member of the Emirates Fine Arts Society, and was previously a member of the Dubai Cultural Council. In addition to her participation in many solo and group exhibitions all over the world, as well as in international biennial exhibitions, she also participated in numerous workshops and jury committees and won many awards that earned her recognition and respect inside and outside the Gulf Region. Inspired by local heritage, her work covers a variety of styles including realism and abstract expressionism, reaching new worlds with the depths of colours she uses to prompt the viewer to contemplate.


Dr. Najat Makki is represented by Hunar Gallery and is a commissioned artist for Beyond: Artist Commissions, Abu Dhabi Art 2021.

Born in 1935 and educated in Pakistan, Araeen trained as an engineer before moving to Europe in the 1960s to become one of the pioneers of minimalist sculpture in Britain. However, he received no institutional recognition for his contribution to the modernist discourse in this country, being side-lined as a non-European whose work was consistently evaluated within the context of post-colonial structures. 


Rasheed has exhibited widely with his most recent exhibition being his retrospective show, Rasheed Araeen: A Retrospective, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands (2018) which later travelled to MAMCO, Musée d'art moderne et contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland (2018), BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, United Kingdom (2018-19) and Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia (2019). His works have been included in important private and public collections across the world. Rasheed lives and works in London, United Kingdom.

Rasheed Araeen is represented by Grosvenor Gallery and is a commissioned artist for Beyond: Artist Commissions, Abu Dhabi Art 2021.