Dima Srouji participates in the headline exhibition for Design Doha: 'Arab Design Now'. The exhibition is curated by Rana Beiruti, a design curator based in Amman, Jordan, and previously the co-founder and director of Amman Design Week.
'Arab Design Now' presents a survey of local and regional design talent across disciplines, from architectural and material innovations to contemporary crafts, furniture, fashion, graphic, and object design.
Dima Srouji's featured artwork 'Maintaining the Sacred II: Transparent Histories', creates a speculative space to imagine a future archaeology of a liberated Jerusalem from below. The partition depicts architectural monuments from Jerusalem that are seminal to the history of architecture often understudied. The wall, itself an architectural element, becomes the storyteller of architectural history and of the history of craft through its material as well as its design.
The monuments engraved and carved through the surfaces take note from Piranesi's Campo Marzio map of Rome and reconfigures it to the city of Jerusalem, Palestine. As Piranesi flattens time and space by inventing his own monuments inspired by the archaeological sites in Rome, this map does the same for architectural monuments in Jerusalem, a city convoluted in its strata with layers of hidden narratives to be excavated.
This project also aims to bring out a forgotten history of glass in architecture by celebrating historically significant techniques of stone carving and glass inlays as were used historically in the Middle East.
The exhibition takes place at M7, in the heart of Msheireb, the creative district of Doha. The exhibition will run from February through to August 2024.