Home shows up unannounced. Home barges in, acknowledges the distance, and contains. Home - a space that holds even as it decays. Home - intrinsically familiar, constantly becoming, the bearer of conviction and contradiction. Home - the omnipresent.

Sand in Nabil’s work embodies the liminality of encountering home as a diasporic Palestinian- an unmistakable however disorienting experience. The reunion of motherland and descendant transcends material boundaries - Palestine is palpable everywhere in this world where the chokeholds of injustice plaguing the global majority are eerily parallel. Even when unsought or unsummoned, home and its adjuncts permeate unlikely locations through colonial alliances and imperial arrangements. For a Palestinian living in the United States the geopolitical complicity is most manifest via U.S. foreign miliatry aid to Israel and the police exchange programs between the settler-colonial partners.

Nabil Harb’s work grapples with home as a dynamic process. Using sand as a medium, Nabil thrusts the beholder into a skeletal universe where what is meant to be permanent appears oddly fleeting. Home in the normative imaginary is a static constant - a guarantee. Since the exodus of 1948, Palestinians continue to be born into a home spiraling, spinning out of control, and out of the purview of those unaffected. Whatever remains faces the threat of extermination and recurring expulsion, if not a lifetime in hiatus.

More than anything, Nabil’s work probes and questions home as an object or an unchanging and euphoric destination. Like sand, Palestine is a shifting landscape, figuratively and in real time. Cast as a portal connecting materiality and consciousness, Palestine in this work calls upon the global majority to envisage, act, and conspire.

nabiljharb.com
@nabiljharb
nabiljharb@gmail.com

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