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.