Isshaq Albarbary

Isshaq Albarbary

Collective learning and planning

Art, co-authoring meanings, critical pedagogy, local self-formed initiatives, collective agency, spatial practices,  performances

Isshaq Albarbary (Bethlehem-Amsterdam) focuses on the interactions happening between refugees and their lived spaces. His work, which has been shaped by his life growing up in a refugee camp in Palestine, is situated between art, politics, and education. It includes performance, spatial intervention, and writing. In his practice, he convenes mujaawarah (مُجاورة, meaning gathering or neighboring) and initiates tanaaqush (تَناقش, the act of discussing) in order to interact with local conditions, imagine other modes of spatial-temporal relations, and re-narrate them through pedagogical and performative actions. This, in turn, acts to historicise lived experiences of extraterritoriality, and to defy state structures that render refugees out of place and out of time, and thus incapable of political agency. Albarbary holds a Master of Fine Art and Design from HKU, Utrecht. He was a 2017/2018 fellow at BAK (basis voor actuele kunst), and previously a participant and coordinator of Campus in Camps. He is also a founding member of the collective Al Maeishah. His work (carried out collaboratively) was presented in biennials and museums such as Bienal de Sao Paulo, Qalandya International, Van Abbemuseum, Documenta 13, Chicago Architecture Biennial and Serralves Museum in Porto.