| Recidency center | |
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| Recidency type | |
| Art form | |
| Time of residency | June 2025 |
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| Contact info | Nadeem-mazen.com |
| Definition of artistic practice? | Nadeem Mazen is an artist and Exhibition curator and Projects coordinator From Jerusalem, a graduate of Contemporary Visual Arts from Birzeit University. Nadeem's work explores various societal and local questions, deeply rooted in his experience as a Palestinian living in Jerusalem, surrounded by art from a young age. His conceptual practice integrates texts, artist statements, process documentation, and research as integral parts of the final artwork or even as the artwork itself. His work spans diverse mediums, including collage, video, research, drawing, digital painting, and installation, among others. As an artist, Nadeem focuses on raising questions and engaging the audience as an active part of the work itself, creating interactive pieces that establish a stronger connection with viewers. He works from the philosophy that art is for the people and the community, emphasizing questions about the presence of artworks in specific times, spaces, and contexts, and their roles within them. As a curator, Nadeem adopts a similar approach, collaborating with artists to ensure their works resonate with the public. He crafts exhibitions that offer new roles, spaces, and formats for art by reimagining traditional exhibition methods. Nadeem experiments with unconventional display techniques and incorporates unexpected elements into exhibitions to build immersive and dynamic scenes, bringing fresh perspectives to artworks and their settings relying heavily on found objects. |
| Title of the investigation at the residency | "من والى "على متن الجزيرة From and to "on the island" |
| Description of investigations and findings | I’m not seeking to be displayed in grand exhibitions or museums, I want to be in everyones homes, anywhere that needs art. I want to make everyone part of this journey. The project first gathered people to draw and paint as a form of resistance, a form of presence. After completing a collective painting practice, we hang the work in a place where everyone could reach it using found objects that are familiar to the eye to create a deeper, more relatable scene, a couch, a dinner table, papers, pens, paints, scissors and more. All of it becomes the installation, the artwork we all worked on together. People where then invited to look at this fabric, choose a part, cut it, and take it with them. That’s where its journey begins to become whatever the viewer decides it will be. For a moment, everyone becomes an artist. Everyone chooses the part that represents them, simply cuts it, and takes it to its new home and maybe one day we collectively can bring these pieces back together. |
| What are you most curious about or invested in in your own practice? | I try my best to have art on the front lines, eliminating the halo it earned over the years. Making art is a form of resistance, it’s a form of expression and collectively we can create an image of what we are living right this second, by gathering and painting together all through the Palestine flag and it’s origin story and the reconstruction of it making it a safe space to talk more about art and Palestine in general. |
| What questions did you bring to investigate and what questions are you leaving with? | What is considered art? What does it evoke? How can we utilize it to bring the communities together? What does the flag in general and the Palestinian flag in these contexts reflect or mean? I left with the same questions and more since my practice revolve around the path to the answer not the answer of the question. |
| Transformative, creative moments at the residency | The residency as a whole was one of the most wholesome and comforting residences, it was free and open to all mediums and artworks, it makes you feel validated and it makes your work bloom into what it needs to be with artists and mentors from all over the world you have different perspectives that can and will be explored. This is a one in a lifetime experience that if the opportunity allows you should take it with no questions. The main thing is that I rediscovered a lot of things about myself |
| Keywords for the work done at the residency | Activism, Co-creation, Community organizing |
| Research locations | The Turkish Island |
| Further documentation | |
| Photos documenting the research |
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| Videos of work in progess or reflections | |
| Webside links |
Nadeem Mazen
