The hammer seizes its actuality | Lamia Abukhadra

Lamia Abukhadra is a Palestinian American artist born in Minneapolis and currently based in Beirut. Comprised of a light installation and an ongoing series of drawings and prints, works presented in Abukhadra’s The hammer seizes its actuality explore the power relations present in the construction, circulation, and perception of photographs and videos taken in contemporary Palestine.

About Lamia Abukhadra’s The hammer seizes its actuality:

Research for these projects began in 2021 during the highly mediatized uprisings and subsequent ongoing violent crackdowns, bombings, and collective punishments in Occupied Palestine, the West Bank, and Gaza. Comprised of a light installation and an ongoing series of drawings and prints, works presented in The hammer seizes its actuality explore the power relations present in the construction, circulation, and perception of photographs and videos taken in contemporary Palestine. These images, meant to document and inform viewers of the daily occurrences of extreme violence, are contextualized in digital spaces which promote the rapid consumption of media and create a dispersive montage for Palestinian images to exist within. Formal elements that create these images, such as color, framing, distortion of bodies and objects, gestures and lines of movement, digital intervention, light, and shadow, serve as points from which to compose and trigger new modes of sight, making visible the forces that create the images while breaking or slowing the cycle of never-ending circulation and consumption. The title of the exhibition, a line from Nuar Alsadir’s poetry book, Fourth Person Singular, refers to the Heideggerian concept of a hammer revealing its true form only when it has been broken.

—Lamia Abukhadra

Artist Bio:

Lamia Abukhadra is a Palestinian American artist born in Minneapolis and currently based in Beirut. Her practice studies how disasters can resurrect and generate new forms of perception, collectivity, and resistance, using the Palestinian and Lebanese contexts as microcosms of urgency. Within her drawings, prints, sculptures, texts, and installations, she embeds speculative frameworks which bring to light intimate and historical connections, poetic occurrences, and generative possibilities of survival, mutation, and self-determination. Lamia graduated from the University of Minnesota with a BFA in interdisciplinary studio art in 2018. She is a 2019-2020 Home Workspace Program Fellow at Ashkal Alwan in Beirut as well as a 2021–2022 Jan van Eyck Academie Resident in Maastricht. Her work has been exhibited in Minneapolis, Chicago, Beirut, and Berlin. Lamia is a 2018–2019 Jerome Emerging Printmaking Resident at Highpoint Center for Printmaking, a 2019 resident at ACRE, and a recipient of a 2017 Soap Factory Rethinking Public Spaces grant. Abukhadra also works in the cultural field, and currently holds the position of Art and Communications Director at Mizna (St. Paul, MN).

www.lamiaabukhadra.com

insta: @lamiaabukhadra

Gallery Hours: 

Thursdays/Fridays/Saturdays/Sundays 1:00- 5:00 starting October 15 through November 12.

Showing alongside FIXING | John Fleischer

Image: LAMIA ABUKHADRA Not the Sunrise (2022) Installation including three spotlights, light filters, rear- projection screen, digital prints, gouache, acetate. 158”x 79”x 79” Photo credit: Romy Finke