ASIAN SALON

Born in 1980 in Jerusalem, Isreal. He Lives and works between Jaffa, Israel and new York. 

Dor Guez is an artist and a scholar. He was born in Jerusalem to a Palestinian family from Lydda on his mother’s side and a family of Jewish immigrants from North Africa on his father’s. Guez’s photography, video installations, essays, and lecture-performances explore the relationship between art, narrative, trauma, memory, and displacement. Interrogating personal experiences and official accounts of the past, Guez raises questions about contemporary art’s role in narrating unwritten histories and re-contextualizing visual and written documents. In the past 20 years, his studies and artistic work focus on archival materials and photographic practices of the Middle East and North Africa, as well as mapping traces of violence in the landscape.

Guez received his Ph.D. from Tel Aviv University in 2014 and earned his professorship from Bezalel Academy of the Arts and Design in 2018. He is the founder of the CPA (Christian-Palestinian Archive), and the Co-director of Seaport: Mediterranean Curatorial Residency.

‘Sabir’, from the Latin root “to know”, refers to a vernacular shared by native speakers of many different languages who come in contact. The best known of the world’s Sabirs is the dialect of middle-eastern ports, which bears elements of French, Italian, Arabic, Hebrew, Maltese, and Spanish. A sabir dialect is a result of a cultural development; it marks a new nation’s arrival. The subject of the video is Samira, the artist's grandmother, whose family used to live on Jaffa port’s edge. Samira describes pre-1948 Jaffa, and the subsequent departure of most of the city’s Arab residents to the other cities/countries, in a mixture of her mother tongue – Arabic – and her later-acquired Hebrew. While most of her childhood memories are recounted in Arabic, the war and its consequences are described in Hebrew. In the background, the sun sets serenely against the Jaffa coast. The discrepancy between Samira’s story and the postcard background, withits everyday commotion of surfers, joggers, and dog-walkers, is poignant. The sun’s height in the frame also serves as a visual marker of Samira’s story’s progress and of passing time. ‘Sabir’ was premiered at DvirGallery, Tel Aviv.

To date, eight catalogues have been published internationally about Guez’s practice. Publishers include Distanz, New England Press, and A.M Qattan Foundation.

Guez’s work has been displayed in over 40 solo exhibitions worldwide; MAN Museum, Nuoro (2018); DEPO, Istanbul (2017); the Museum for Islamic Art, Jerusalem (2017); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit (2016); the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2015); the Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv (2015)). He has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including shows at the Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art (2016); the North Coast Art Triennial, Denmark (2016).