A beak-masked ‘plague doctor’ walks though the ravaged streets of Athens; Doctor Bashar Al Assad’s face shaded with dark sun-glasses declaims ‘Our Fortress of Resistance, For Ever’; a UFO shaped maquette of the Louvre Museum on Abu Dhabi's Sa'diyyat Island; an image of the flaming body of Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor who set himself alight in 2011 in protest against police humiliation. In Rana Hamadeh's lecture-performance 'Al Karantina' original photographs and documents, historical events, personal encounters and fictions are woven together in a web of associations to question notions of contagion and resistance, citizenship and alienness in the framework of the current Arab uprisings.

Biography:

Rana Hamadeh is a performance and visual artist from Beirut currently based in the Netherlands. Interested in a curatorial approach within her artistic practice, she works on long term discursive research-based projects that involve different levels of collaborations, and that are presented to the public in the form of lecture-performances, audio/text based installations, mind maps, and public/documented conversations. She initiated in 2008 and 2011 two ongoing research-based projects, 'GRAPHIS N˚127' and ‘Alien Encounters’, under which she has been producing different art works, publications and texts. Her work has been presented at (a.o.) The Townhouse Gallery (Cairo, 2012), Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, 2011/2008), Beirut Art Center (Beirut, 2010), Teylers Museum (Haarlem, 2010) and New Museum (New York, 2009). She is currently auditing within the Curatorial Knowledge PhD programme at Goldsmiths University, London.

www.ranahamadeh.nl

The work is a new commission for "The Magic of the State", an exhibition and editorial project by Beirut and Lisson Gallery, taking place in Cairo and London in Spring 2013. Each exhibition features a different constellation of works by the same artists, including new commissions, and a public program of performances, talks and screenings.