Isshaq Albarbary
Isshaq Albarbary (b. 1988, Beit Jibrin Refugee Camp) lives and works between Amsterdam and Bethlehem. His transdisciplinary practice takes up the materials and procedures through which statelessness is administered, from humanitarian aid and bureaucratic documents to the infrastructures of the refugee camp and of settler colonialism.
Informed by his working methodology tanaaqush, from the Arabic root naqasha, which joins the acts of engraving and argument, he holds each object to its function under pressure until the argument built into it surfaces. He has pulped the file of his Dutch citizenship into toilet paper, the document that admitted him to the state remade as one of the emergencies supplies its “Think Ahead” campaign instructed households to stockpile against seventy-two hours of infrastructural collapse.
Albarbary co-developed Campus in Camps, an experimental educational programme in Dheisheh Refugee Camp, and co-founded Al Maeishah Collective. He holds an MFA from HKU University of the Arts Utrecht (2020) and has been a fellow at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst (2017-2018), Utrecht; IASPIS, Stockholm; and Amant NYC (2022). His work has been presented at documenta 14, the 31st Bienal de São Paulo, the Van Abbemuseum, the Serralves Museum, The Renaissance Society, and de Appel, Amsterdam, among others.
Albarbary was a contributor to Errant Journal No. 4 States of Statelessness.