Palestinian artist Harb, who shuttles between Dubai and Rome, in his sculptural installation titled Unlimited Progress, presents the interplay between time and urban change in a fast-developing city such as Dubai, where large tracts of desert give way to urban expansion. Harb, who visited Dubai first in 2012, has been interested in architecture and urban development, and the city has provided him the backdrop to examine the “co-related relationship between progress and time”.

In his multimedia artworks, the artist has juxtaposed various references to pre-1948 Palestine with concrete blocks, which can be seen as a symbol of occupation, representing the apartheid wall, the road blocks encountered daily by Palestinians, and the intrusion of other architectural styles on Palestinian architecture.

The artworks highlight the fact that while architecture can provide shelter, it also has the potential to destroy people and obliterate their existence. Through the heaviness and destructive power of architecture, Harb speaks about the violence of occupation and the destruction of cultural narratives.

However, he also expresses hope in the power and potential of architecture to reverse the destruction and to construct a better future. The show is organised by Salsali Private Museum in collaboration with Athr gallery, Jeddah, and curated by Lara Khaldi.

The Written City exhibition looks at the spatial organization of city and state as a product of often conflicting political intentions. The exhibition analyzes the relationships between several political discourses and their design, interpretation and control of the urban and national space.

The Written City brings together contrasting perspectives of the construction, the use, the representations and the questioning or disputing of the political production of space.

The development of urban and national space often presupposes forms of physical or symbolic inclusion and exclusion. In that respect the exhibition deals with a number of spatial metaphors such as barricades, boundaries and fences or so-called “gated communities,” and at the same time the destruction or penetration of these types of partition.

The list of the participating artists forms a strong connection to a region in which political decisions and urbanisation are complicated and unstable. Amongst others are two artists from Palestine  – Raeda Saadeh and Hazem Harb – who are dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with a particular reference to architecture of violence.

Having spent his childhood and teenage years growing up in the contested grounds of Gaza, Palestinian artist Hazem Harb’s artistic output serves as an apolitical, first hand ACCOUNT of this on-going conflict. In his works he deals with a number of core issues including war, loss, trauma, human vulnerability and global instability affected by the situation in the Occupied Territories of Palestine.

Harb has been working on this series, his first museum show, since 2008. For The Archaeology of Occupation series, Harb has super­imposed angular shapes onto landscape photographs. For The Tag Series, he has taken anonymous family portraits, placing squares over faces in the same way that Facebook prompts a user to “tag” or identify people in photos. “Tagging is about recognition of existence,” says El Khalil. “Here the artist is talking on behalf of the people saying ‘we are here, we are the people of the land’.” Also on display is a ­collection of ­photomontages made from pre-1948 images of Palestine.

While this show marks a significant point in Harb’s career, it also shows maturity and development for Athr, which started out as a ­contemporary art gallery in ­Jeddah but is quickly establishing itself as one of the most important initiatives in the Gulf. “One of our missions is to create dialogue,” El Khalil says. “It is very important for us that we bring to the world a dialogue that originates in Saudi Arabia but that also comes back to Saudi Arabia as well.

A special commission by Gaza-born artist Hazem Harb, on view during Art Week, memorialized the actual construction of the Avenue's expansion through video and sculpture; it was admittedly strange and uncomfortable to stand there and watch footage of half a dozen foreign laborers performing their tasks while singing, since labor conditions in the UAE don’t typically generate the most pleasing melodies. 

Hazem Harb’s The Invisible Landscape and Concrete Futures is a nostalgic yearning for a land lost to occupation. Questioning the notion of architecture being destructive rather than protective, Harb’s show, based largely on photographs of pre-1948 Palestine, is a large, moving exhibition that has taken him eight years to complete. It is showing at Salsali Private Museum in Alserkal Avenue.

Tomorrow, Hazem Harb’s first solo exhibition in Saudi Arabia opens in Athr Gallery. Harb, a Palestinian artist from Gaza, has explored Islamic geometry through his Al Baseera series - where, as art historian Salwa Mikdadi says, “he utilises colour to evoke a sense of loss and turmoil”.