Wafa Hourani

Born in 1979 in Hebron in Palestine, Wafa Hourani now lives and works in Ramallah. Deeply marked by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the future of the Middle East, the artist develops a work which reveals the social, political and economical context of life in Palestine.

Graduate from the school of Art and Cinema in Tunis, he first directed films before shifting to a visual production in 2006. According to him, this is a more suited format to express the Palestinian question. Using photography and sculpture, he has been creating environments revealing a reality in which past and future are intrinsically linked.

Integral part of the Photolife project, the Qalandia series (2006-2009) particularly expresses the involvement of the artist through the vision of a Palestinian reality projected a hundred years after the great events of its history: the Palestinian exodus (Qalandia 2047), the six-day war (Qalandia 2067) and the first Intifada (Qalandia 2087). Emblematic of the artist production, the works which reconstitutes one of the main check-points and Palestinian refugee camps as an architectural model were (separately) exhibited at the 1st Thessaloniki biennial in 2007, and in 2009 at "Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East" at the Saatchi Gallery in London, the 11th Istanbul biennial and at "Disorientation II" in Abu Dhabi.