February 5–May 11, 2025
Education City
Doha
Qatar
Artists: Nour Shantout, Tibian Bahari, Dima Srouji, the creative studio Beirut Urban Lab, and Sarri Elfaitouri.
Ruins, Derelicts & Erasure—a new exhibition at VCUarts Qatar’s Gallery to focus on destruction of historical roots and traditions.
VCUarts Qatar hosts an exhibition highlighting the response by artists and designers to deliberate acts of cultural erasure through the destruction of historical roots, values, heritage, literature, traditions, and language of a culture or people. The exhibition will run until May 11, 2025.
Ruins, Derelicts & Erasure will feature works by five artists from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region: Nour Shantout (Syrian/Palestinian), Tibian Bahari from Sudan, Dima Srouji from Palestine, the creative studio Beirut Urban Lab from Lebanon, and Sarri Elfaitouri from Libya. The artist’s works are a form of resilience and highlight the need to preserve their countries’ heritage, culture, and history.
The artists will use various media such as textiles, sand, print, imagery, data visualization, and graphic design. For instance, Tibian Bahari uses textiles, print and sand to examine the physical landscape of Sudan and the personality of the land during times of war. Her artworks Self Portrait: Sakhr Al Sudan, 50kg, Fabric of Space: Tracing The Natural, and Al-Attar will be on display at the exhibition.
Nour Shantout’s pieces titled Searching for the New Dress, and Love Poems will be part of the exhibition. While Searching for the New Dress is a research-based project that looks at Palestinian embroidery in Shatila, a Palestinian camp in Lebanon, Love Poems connects the Palestinian struggle with the global indigenous struggles for liberation.
Count(er)ing—Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon by Beirut Lab will feature three animated data visualizations that track the “urbicide” in Gaza, monitor settler-colonial violence in the West Bank, and record the escalation of military operations in Lebanon. The animated snapshots are supported by static descriptions and macro readings. The readings are synchronized over an almost year-long timeline and document the hostilities at different temporal rhythms.
For more information about the exhibition, please visit here.
Curated by Meriem Aiouna and Dina Alkhateeb
