Qais Assali
2021
Arist2Artist Fellowship
I design, translate, walk, layout, tile, pile, pattern, image, repeat, abstract, hide, copy, construct, overlap. I solve problems. I make problems, I out, I witness, I recognize, I teach, I lecture, I advertise, I commercialize. I import educational dynamics to art and society through design and education. As a Palestinian artist/designer, I commercialize, politicize and displace causes, ideologies, sites, jokes, names, relationships, barriers, or subject positions based on unsmart practical geopolitical conceptualism and design. I seek to complicate historical hierarchies. I am the result of my generation, experiencing the entire Second Intifada and trying to frame or shape it in different ways. These historical narratives fuel my passionate gaze toward the Middle East by subverting notions of oppression and victimhood. My work shows how the case of Palestine is more broadly connected to the problems of the Arab world and the whole world and to see the historic Palestinian relationship to colonization and imperialism.