Raafat Hattab

Raafat Hattab makes performative and video works using language and music to explore issues of identity and belonging. His practice layers iconographies of East and West and through double meaning, collapses the two spheres. Hattab weaves emblems of folklore and tradition into an imagined community, deviating from clear-cut geographical borders. 

Interested in “the diversity in the middle”, Hattab dissolves binaries starting with that of male/female, inviting viewers to tread on the line between perceived genders. His film, Houria حورية, translated to mermaid in English and a play on the Arabic horia حرية meaning freedom, invokes The Little Mermaid, who traded her vocal chords for legs, taking silence to become human. While Hattab’s Houria حورية locates freedom in the sexless mermaid, whose human anatomy is truncated from the waist down, his “Bride of Palestine” alter ego uses gender as a tool to problematize political oppression.

Hattab was born to a Muslim Family in Jaffa in 1981. He studied at Hamidrasha School of Art at Beit Berl College. A queer Palestinian living in Tel Aviv, Hattab was a member of alQaws for Sexual and Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society from 2006 to 2012. 

Selected exhibitions include:

2013: “Wonderland”, Bundestag, Berlin, Germany
2013: “Ma TabaQa Lakum (What’s Left For You)”, Alfred Gallery, Tel Aviv (solo exhibition)
2012: “The Garden of Eden”, Palais de Tokyo, Paris
2012: “ICI”, Michel Rein Gallery, Paris
2009: “Men in the Sun", Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art