Saba Innab
Station Point
30 Aug - 01 Dec 2019
SABA INNAB
Station Point
30 August – 1 December 2019
Curator: Omar Berrada
Exhibition | In technical drawings, a station point is the point from which a perspective is constructed. Anything that is located behind it, or in its blind spot, will be absent from the drawing. Innab’s Station Point probes spatial representation as a way to reflect on the entanglements of architecture and power. The exhibition unfolds across three chapters.
The show opens on a personal note, with a letter from Saba Innab to Malevich, highlighting the blind spots of European avant-gardes and registering the impossibility of love between a Palestinian architect and the modern art movements that nourished her education.
The second chapter, composed of a sketchbook, a drawing, and several small architectural models, moves from intimate intuition to historical investigation. From Renaissance “ideal cities” to modern colonial settlements, Innab traces architectural authority through the persistence of central perspective as a mode of visual control that continuously produced spatial and legal marginalization.
Is there a way out of the frame? The third chapter attempts an answer. A set of columns and beams constructs a single vanishing point. At its base lies a ruin made of claustra blocks, cut and arranged in a set of underground tunnels and inverted domes reclaimed from a buried history of vernacular construction. Upon looking at this landscape, one ́s gaze is systematically interrupted. By experimenting with material and form, the artist turns vulnerability into a proposition for an alternative politics of space. Within an uninhabitable world, the exhibition makes a plea for dwelling otherwise.
“Curators in Residence” grant scheme is organised by KfW Stiftung in collaboration with ifa.
With the exhibition Station Point ifa Gallery Berlin participates in the Architecture+Art Weekend 2019.
Station Point
30 August – 1 December 2019
Curator: Omar Berrada
Exhibition | In technical drawings, a station point is the point from which a perspective is constructed. Anything that is located behind it, or in its blind spot, will be absent from the drawing. Innab’s Station Point probes spatial representation as a way to reflect on the entanglements of architecture and power. The exhibition unfolds across three chapters.
The show opens on a personal note, with a letter from Saba Innab to Malevich, highlighting the blind spots of European avant-gardes and registering the impossibility of love between a Palestinian architect and the modern art movements that nourished her education.
The second chapter, composed of a sketchbook, a drawing, and several small architectural models, moves from intimate intuition to historical investigation. From Renaissance “ideal cities” to modern colonial settlements, Innab traces architectural authority through the persistence of central perspective as a mode of visual control that continuously produced spatial and legal marginalization.
Is there a way out of the frame? The third chapter attempts an answer. A set of columns and beams constructs a single vanishing point. At its base lies a ruin made of claustra blocks, cut and arranged in a set of underground tunnels and inverted domes reclaimed from a buried history of vernacular construction. Upon looking at this landscape, one ́s gaze is systematically interrupted. By experimenting with material and form, the artist turns vulnerability into a proposition for an alternative politics of space. Within an uninhabitable world, the exhibition makes a plea for dwelling otherwise.
“Curators in Residence” grant scheme is organised by KfW Stiftung in collaboration with ifa.
With the exhibition Station Point ifa Gallery Berlin participates in the Architecture+Art Weekend 2019.