menu
search

Fellowship

Fellow 2018/2019

Reconstruction of a no-longer accessible Google Maps satellite image, with the camp of Burj al-Shamali digitally blanked out ©Digital Globe 2007 and Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh, 2017

Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh

Artist Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh has a background in photography. She combines research, conversational, image and (meta)archival practices with long-term involvement to reflect on the agency of photographs and notions of collectivity and power. Her work connects to the interhuman relationships that come into being over time. One of her long-term projects explores the impossibilities of representation, through a negotiation process around a potential digital archive assembled in collaboration with inhabitants of Burj al-Shamali, a Palestinian refugee camp near Tyr, Lebanon. In 2018, she received her PhD from the Institute of Art Theory and Cultural Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Since 2008, she is a member of the Arab Image Foundation, a non-profit organization that collects, preserves, and studies photography from the Middle East, North Africa, and the Arab diaspora, and presents the by now extensive collection to the public through an online database, publications, and exhibitions. Eid-Sabbagh was a Fellow in the 2018/2019 BAK Fellowship program She received the Arles Discovery Award, 2013 and the 8th Vevey International Photography Award, 2011, for her collaboration with Rozenn Quéré, titled Vies Possibles et Imaginaires [Possible and Imaginary Lives].

Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh

Artist Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh has a background in photography. She combines research, conversational, image and (meta)archival practices with long-term involvement to reflect on the agency of photographs and notions of collectivity and power. Her work connects to the interhuman relationships that come into being over time. One of her long-term projects explores the impossibilities of representation, through a negotiation process around a potential digital archive assembled in collaboration with inhabitants of Burj al-Shamali, a Palestinian refugee camp near Tyr, Lebanon. In 2018, she received her PhD from the Institute of Art Theory and Cultural Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Since 2008, she is a member of the Arab Image Foundation, a non-profit organization that collects, preserves, and studies photography from the Middle East, North Africa, and the Arab diaspora, and presents the by now extensive collection to the public through an online database, publications, and exhibitions. Eid-Sabbagh was a Fellow in the 2018/2019 BAK Fellowship program She received the Arles Discovery Award, 2013 and the 8th Vevey International Photography Award, 2011, for her collaboration with Rozenn Quéré, titled Vies Possibles et Imaginaires [Possible and Imaginary Lives].

Fellowship Research Trajectory

Frictional Conversations: Negotiating Collective Agency is an instantiation of artist Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh’s long-term research practice in Burj Shamali camp, Tyre. This experimental research trajectory builds on an extended stay in Burj Shamali, a Palestinian refugee camp southeast of Tyre, in southern Lebanon, where Eid-Sabbagh lived (2006–2011) and has been working since 2001. During this time, she developed and gathered—mostly in collaboration with camp residents—an extensive digital collection of personal and studio photographs, videos, and audio recordings. This long work process and the digital collection it has generated address the conditions and effects of global migration and refugee politics, and aim at making representational political questions and power hierarchies visible/legible.

In this research, Eid-Sabbagh works toward a collective embodiment of the digital collection of Burj Shamali, creating different types of interventions that experiment with how the digital collection and its political implications could be presented to the general public without being exhausted.

Training by Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh and Hamada al-Joumah: An Investigation into Collective Work Processes for Self-Determination

BAK 2018/2019 Fellow Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh and community activist Hamada al-Joumah convene the sixteenth training as part of the Trainings for the Not-Yet, An Investigation into Collective Work Processes for Self-Determination, from 27 November to 1 December 2019. The training focuses on discussions, collective readings, presentations, and exercises for developing a resource box for collective working and […]

March BAK 2018/2019 Fellows Intensive with activists, artists, and theorists in Barcelona

BAK 2018/2019 Fellows Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh and Jeanne van Heeswijk co-convened the March Fellows Intensive with critic, writer, and curator Ethel Baraona Pohl in Barcelona. The Intensive focused on, among other things, collective practices and facilitation, housing movements, artistic action, and neighborhood initiatives. The Fellows had the privilege of getting to speak in depth with members of La Borda, Calàbria 66, Can Batlló, La Ciutat Invisible, La Col, Coòpolis, De Veí a Veí, Espai en Blanc and Marina Garcés, Fil a l’agulla, La Lleialtat Santsenca, and La PAH.

Archival Propositions

BAK 2018/2019 Fellows Jessica de Abreu and Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh present at Propositions #7/6: Archive, the final iteration of the public series Propositions #7: Evidentiary Methods. The event also features Ariel Caine (Forensic Architecture, London) and takes place at BAK in the context of the exhibition Forensic Justice (18 October 2018–27 January 2019). This program is […]

Program

Related content

Whitney Stark

Ending the Post-Academic BAK 2018/2019 Fellowship

In June 2019, the post-academic BAK 2018/2019 Fellowship comes to a close. After ten months of intensive thinking, imagining, enacting, practicing, troubling, discussing, laughing, sometimes even crying, the Fellows continue on their work in differing forms. Throughout our time together, the Fellows and their research have influenced and transformed each other’s as well as BAK. […]

Jeanne van Heeswijk

Three Generations of BAK Fellows Present at Propositions #10: Instituting Otherwise

BAK 2017/2018 Fellows Isshaq Al-Barbary and Matthijs de Bruijne, as well as 2018/2019 Fellow Jeanne van Heeswijk and 2019/2020 Fellow Mitchell Esajas presented and engaged in training and discussion as part of BAK’s program Propositions #9: Instituting Otherwise on 7 December 2019 at BAK, probing the question of how to institute spaces for art in […]

Mick Wilson, Patricia Kaersenhout

Propositions for Non-Fascist Living: Tentative and Urgent Published!

BAK has published the first publication in a series on our research trajectory Propositions for Non-Fascist Living (2017–ongoing), Propositions for Non-Fascist Living: Tentative and Urgent (MIT Press, 2019). Moving from critique to propositions, the project attempts to articulate and inhabit methods of de-individualized living and to practice ways in which multiplicity and difference establish relations […]

Jeanne van Heeswijk

Practicing Tactical Solidarities: A Roundtable on Mutual Aid, Emergency, and Continuous Care

Streaming online at bakonline.org/prospections and on social media: @BAKUtrecht on Facebook and @BAK basis voor actuele kunst on YouTube With Afrikaanderwijk Cooperative (including BAK 2018/2019 Fellow Jeanne van Heeswijk), Rotterdam; the Basic Activist Kitchen, Utrecht; Brigate Volontarie per l’emergenza, Milan; and Homebaked Anfield, Liverpool Coordinated communitarian responses to this crisis have abounded, with individuals and […]

Publications