User:Nateel/sandbox

'''MAJDAL NATEEL '''

(b. 1987 in Saudi Arabia) / an artist from a Palestinian refugee family. Nateel grew up in Gaza and received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Fine Art from al-Aqsa University-2009 and she is currently based in Sweden.

Her artistic research has participated in many different places. The main inspiration for her early artworks was the lived experience and she tried to translate the reflections of individual cases on society, such as “Memory’s Salt” -2011 and “The Impact of Light and glass”-2013.

After 2014 the artistic research process began to focus on searching for the value of humanity under political challenges, especially threats of repeated wars and the ongoing blockade of Gaza Strip. For example, the installation work “If I Was Not There” in 2014 dedicated the artistic tools to talking on behalf of many children who lost their voices and became victims of the bombs.” Under the same context, she produced "Without Coffins” which was on the YAYA shortlist in 2014. It is a contract scene of recovering the bodies of the “numbers martyrs” that Israel still keeps. She also produced “The Dream is Possible” for the same competition in 2016, this work materializes the concept of ‘return’ as an individual and collective dream that defines the Palestinian.

Between 2017-2019, she started the “Lane” project, she created an imaginary corridor that helps to overcome the feelings of being stuck between the borders, and unable to travel. The characters in this artwork are looking to exit, exit towards the world, without running away from anything, and sheds the light on our humanity, neglected by politics in our small corner of the world. In the last project “Studying the Voids of Amputation” 2020-2021 she linked physical amputation and geographic amputation and produced a body of works on this theme, and recently she was part of the artists who participated in the after-the-turn program "Decolonial and Noncanonical Learning in Gaza" with the Goethe Institute in Palestine, and was a resident in SPK- Sommerakademie Paul Klee for 16 months, the program hosted by the Bern Academy of the Arts HKB.. Majdal's work still focuses on the impact of colonialism, occupation, and siege on the physical structure of human beings under these conditions. For that, she still completes her work in the research “studying the void of amputation”.

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