Saba Innab
Untitled (Map) | 2012
Ink on butter paper. 30 x 200 cm. From "How to Build Without a Land" (2011-ongoing)
Untitled (Map) is a drawing that- constantly- revisits the frontiers with Palestine and retrace them from current Google maps. The Jordanian, Syrian, Lebanese, and Egyptian frontier strips are retraced from one side- the opposite side to Palestine.
Densities and shapes of terrains and settlements are abstracted into pictorial forms and lines, that are unfolded and reattached becoming an organic, somehow an alive line that is neither real nor imagined. A line that is defined by an absence, contemplating on being at the limit of things.
Whenever exhibited, the map is drawn directly on the wall of the exhibition space, to be demolished or erased afterwards. Here is a chance to revisit this ephemeral intimacy and construct the line on paper in limited editions.
“How to Build Without a Land” investigates the relationship of building and dwelling to time, to temporariness that gradually transforms into permanence. Referencing the Palestinian refuge and exile, and human alienation in general, the work recognizes the impossibility of construction without land as self-evident. However, imagining such possibility may be an essential prerequisite to effecting long-due change in architecture and politics. The project is composed of several elements- the poetic, the scientific, and the hallucinatory, constructing a spatial narrative.
Reference SI-WP-2012-A
Biography of the artist
Born in Kuwait. 1980
Works and Lives in Between Amman and Beirut.
Architect, urban researcher, and artist practicing out of Amman and Beirut. She holds a Bachelor of Architecture Engineering from the Jordan University of Science and Technology (2004).
Innab has worked as an architect and urban planner with UNRWA on the reconstruction of Nahr el Bared Palestinian refugee Camp in the North of Lebanon, a project nominated for the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2013. In 2014, she has received the visiting research fellowship initiated by Studio X Amman (Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation).
Her work was exhibited most recently in the 57th edition of Carnegie International- Pittsburgh, USA (2018-2019), Relics of Now- Milano Arch Week, Triennale di Milano (2018), Biennale d’Architecture d’Orléans, Frac Centre-Val de Loire- Orléans, France (2017), Misunderstandings, Campo- Rome (2016), Marrakech Biennial 6 (2016), Home Works7 (2015), Lest the Two Seas Meet, Museum of Modern Art- Warsaw (2015) and HIWAR/Conversations in Amman, Darat al Funun- Amman (2013). Her solo shows include Al Rahhalah (The Traveler) in Marfa’- Beirut (2016), No- Sheep’s Land in Darat al Funun- Amman (2011) and Agial Gallery- Beirut (2011). She has participated in Home Workspace Program (HWP) 2011-2012.
Through drawing, mapping, model making and design, her work explores the suspended states between temporality and permanence, and is concerned with variable notions of dwelling and building and their political, spatial and poetic implications in language and architecture.
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