PALESTINE: TRACING BOUNDARIES
Holy Gates - Bashar Alhroub
Bashar Alhroub
Born in Jerusalem in 1978, currently living and working in Ramallah. Bashar Alhroub graduated with a BA in Fine Arts from Al-Najah National University, Palestine in 2001. He was awarded the Ford Foundation fellowship to pursue an MFA, which he completed in 2010 from the Winchester School of Art, the University of Southampton in the UK. In 2012, Alhroub was awarded the first grand prize at the 14th Art Asian Biennial, Bangladesh.
Alhroub works with a variety of media including photography, video installation, drawing, and paintings. His work directly deals with the polemics of a place, questioning its role in humanity and its influence on creativity. His work is deeply influenced by the socio-political sentiments that assert his identity as well as his desire to belong to a social and cultural community; rooted in a particular place, Alhroub constantly longs for a feeling of attachment, a sense of significant ownership of that place.
More recently, his work began to engage with the search into the self. Using the body as a signifier, his work shows the threatened self-identity through the process of scrutiny and experimentation. The work deals with personal vulnerability and experience of existential anxiety strongly associated with issues such as religion, nationalism, conflict, and identity construction. Moreover, it looks for meaning, not in the individual sign, but in the context of exile and fragmentation.
Bashar Alhroub’s work is also included in a number of international collections and museums including the Imperial War Museum, London; Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah; China Printmaking Museum- China; Bengal National Gallery, Bangladesh; Birzeit University Museum collection, Palestine; Omi Art Centre, New York; and Michael Abbate collection, New York; Bank of Palestine collection, Palestine; Contemporary Art Platform Kuwait- Kuwait and Dalloul Art Foundation DAF in Beirut.