Dor Guez | Knowing the Land | London 2022
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.
The phrase “Knowing the Land” was coined in 1845 by Joseph Schwarz, one of the first geographers of Ottoman Palestine. 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.
Artworks
Films
About
Dor Guez
Dor Guez Munayer’s (b. Jerusalem) practice comprises photography, video, installations, and sculpture. Through multimedia performances, Guez transforms art into a vehicle for storytelling. During a recent performance at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, he examined multi-colonial projections looking at different historical resources. His latest overview, “Catastrophe,” at the Museum of Modern Art in Bogotá in 2022, spanned a wide range of works that reflect the artist’s engagement with his communities and the ever-evolving studies of the Mediterranean Basin.
Guez’s work has been displayed in solo exhibitions at the Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico City (2023); Felix Nussbaum Museum, Osnabrück (2023); MAMBO: Museum of Modern Art, Bogota (2022); Kunst im Kreuzgang, Bielefeld (2021); Futura Gallery, Prague, (2020); American Colony Archive, Jerusalem (2019); MAN Museum, Nuoro (2018); the Museum for Islamic Art, Jerusalem (2017); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit (2016); the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2015) the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Massachusetts (2013); The Mosaic Rooms, A.M Qattan Foundation, Centre for Contemporary Arab Culture & Art, London (2013) and the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2010).
Guez’s works are included in public collections such as Tate Modern London, Center Pompidou Paris, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, LACMA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Princeton University Art Museum, The Jewish Museum New York, Rose Art Museum, FRAC collection Marseille, Museum of Modern Art Bogota, and more.
Dor Guez Munayer lives and works between Jaffa and Athens.
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