Dor Guez
Knowing the Land
Goodman Gallery presents Knowing the Land, Dor Guez’s first solo exhibition with the gallery in London. Guez was born in Jerusalem to a Palestinian family on his mother’s side and to a family of North African Jewish immigrants on his father’s side. His new body of work raises questions about the role of contemporary art in narrating unwritten histories and re-contextualizing visual and written documents.
The exhibition includes a photographic series, sculptures and a video installation in which Guez mines mythological and political dimensions of his homeland as a site of colonial projections and strategies. Through Knowing the Land, the artist threads connections between public and private archives, traditional photographic techniques, and maps.
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Today, Knowing the Land Studies have become more recognised as an academic discipline across local universities, separate from the subject of Geography. Referring to “Knowing the Land”, and its evolution during the British Mandate period in Palestine, Guez’s work points to the close relationship between routine colonial practices and the exploration of the Levant.
Artist Bio
Dor Guez Munayer (born in Jerusalem) is an artist whose practice is shaped by acts of return: to particular places, images, narratives, and material traces, revisited over years and sometimes decades to trace how their meanings shift over time. Moving between personal, communal, and institutional contexts, he examines how historical knowledge is recorded, transmitted, and continually reinterpreted.
Guez’s work initially took shape through the experiences of three generations of his Palestinian family and community in Lydda, bringing personal documents, oral testimonies, archival materials, photography, and film into dialogue. Other bodies of work draw on the experiences of his Jewish family from Tunisia, including their migration following the Second World War. Over the past two decades, he has repeatedly documented landscapes and architectural sites, considering how testimony can reside not only in human accounts and images, but also in buildings, plants, objects, roads, and other material traces.
His practice extends into long-term archival and institutional initiatives. In 2006, he established the Samira Munayer Archive, originating from the family albums of his maternal family and later expanding through contributions from Palestinian families and communities. He is also the founder and director of SeaPort Art Center for Curatorial Research, an independent artist-led platform for research, residencies, and public programs based in Athens.
Guez has presented over 65 solo exhibitions internationally, including at Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico City; Princeton University Art Museum; MAMBO, Bogotá; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; DEPO, Istanbul; and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin. His work has been included in the Berlin Biennale, Istanbul Biennial, Videobrasil, Bienal de Arte Paiz, and exhibitions at Palais de Tokyo, Paris; MAXXI, Rome; ZKM, Karlsruhe; K21, Düsseldorf; The Jewish Museum, New York; and Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris.
His works are held in public collections including Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; LACMA, Los Angeles; Guggenheim Abu Dhabi; Princeton University Art Museum; The Jewish Museum, New York; MAMBO, Bogotá; The New York Public Library; Rose Art Museum; and FRAC Marseille.
Guez lives and works in Jaffa and Athens.
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