Dana Qaddah

Lives and works in New York, NY

Artist statement

I am an interdisciplinary artist and organizer who deeply engages the intimacies of being a political and social witness. I come from 3 generations of displacement from Palestine to Lebanon and the Arab Gulf. My family claimed our relations to people and places as modern expatriates, with lineage exclusively marked by war or financial collapse. We became those who never “settle.” Between Beirut, Dubai, and Vancouver, I watched cities grow on economic aspirations laid by colonial legacies and others collapse under precarity. As such, I centre the “city” as a site of cultural confrontation and draw on it to make art across disciplines, mainly in sculpture, photography, publication, and audio/visual work. My practice expands my personal history with research into architectural anthropology and the politics of visual representation. As a home, Beirut has strongly defined my decision-making in the studio into a practice of resourcefulness, make-shift infrastructures, and material excess and has contributed to an archive of found and fabricated materials to form a language of critical reflection. My ongoing series, Itinerant Sentiments, works through my deep love for materials and their capacity. In 2019, Roof d’état, another series, captured Lebanon on the brink of economic collapse through material reference in sculpture and photography. Manifestations of a voyage (2022) was a solo exhibition of historically referential, queer, Palestinian dowries crafted from materials...

Artwork