Personal Info
- Country of residence: Palestine
Information
Alexandra Sophia Handal is a Palestinian artist, director and writer on the subject of international upbringing who has resided in Europe since 2004, where she is also trying to spend other periods of residence in Palestine.
the biography
Alexandra's life in exile took her to different corners of the world. She was born to a Palestinian family originally from the city of Bethlehem and residing in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1975 during the dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier.
Her family moved to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and Alexandra grew up during her teenage years there. She went on to pursue art at Boston University, where she obtained a BA in painting and a minor in art history in 1997, then continued her education with a bachelor’s degree at New York University in 2001.
In 2004, Alexandra was awarded the University of Kuala Lumpur Student Prize to undertake a PhD in Practice/Theory at the University of the Arts London, graduating in 2011.[1]
During her graduate studies, she was a member of the TRIN research center. After living ten years in London, Alexandra moved to Amsterdam, Netherlands, before settling in Berlin; Germany with her family, where she established her own studio.
the art
In (September-December 2016) her first solo museum exhibition, Memory Flows Like Tides at Dusk was at Mset lsamtidskunst, Roskilde, Denmark. New works are exhibited alongside existing ones, bringing together her multifaceted examination of artworks on collective loss.
In 2007, she began oral history fieldwork with Palestinian refugees and exiles from West Jerusalem. This original research material has been used to create a body of work that investigates the ramifications of psychological, mental and physical boundaries, highlighting personal narratives of dispossession and displacement. The museum has published a catalog to accompany Alexandra's solo exhibition, which focused on the divided city of Jerusalem. In conversation with curator Alia Rayan in Mapping Off-the-Grid Terrains, Alexandra discusses how different aspects of the migration experience have shaped her cultural field:
“For the past three generations, displacement has been a constant in my family. The ongoing wars and conflicts in the Middle East can be traced back to this cycle of turmoil... I have experienced no other form of belonging but from an outsider’s side. However, what it means It transformed over time from being a space of alienation to one of creations, where new perceptions were possible. Having multiple affiliations meant that I had never fully seen who we were on the inside. However, while I had never known what it meant to be wholly part of a country One, I have connections and access to many, whether legal, cultural, historical, linguistic or emotional. From where I stand, I observe things from the outside in and from the inside out. This gives me an understanding of knowledge gaps such as what has been forgotten, excluded, erased and ignored. In fact The outsider can see things that others - even those in power - are unable to see from their position. I had identified in the term outsider, a whole new meaning. I realized that “outside” or “inside” is actually a matter of power structures (national (academic, sexual, and social). This awareness was liberating. It opened a space for me to chart a whole new cultural terrain that included every part of me.
Among the exhibition works at the museum was her ongoing giant project, “Dream Homes Property Consultants (DHCP) - (Dream Homes Property Consultants - (DHCP)). This “web documentary art” has been in the making since 2007. It was an official selection in “ Edfa Doclab (2013), which had its international premiere. It has been included in a number of festivals such as Oxdoc Rencontres Internationales du Documentaire de Montreuil (2014), and the interdisciplinary Przemyani Festival at the Copernicus Science Center, Warsaw. , "Picturening Palestine": Centering and Panel Discussion of Modern Art Oxford for Apartments Apart Week and after the recent Sky Festival in Berlin (2016). Dream Homes Real Estate Consulting (DK) won the Lumen People's Choice Gold Award 2014 (UK), second prize of the Freedom Flowers Foundation Prize (Switzerland), and shortlisted for the ARTRACKER Prize 2013 (UK). Independently produced by a filmmaker from the Middle East and North Africa region.Since 2014, Duck has been among the 20 most viewed web documentaries on the MIT Open Documentary Lab, a “curated database of people and projects.” Documentary conversion technologies in the digital age. On the occasion of the tenth edition of "EDFA Doclab" (2016), an international committee composed of new media curators, producers, acclaimed artists and specialists in the field of "non-fiction non-fiction and art" was invited to select the projects that have made the most impact in the last decade. Dream Homes Real Estate Consultants (DK) was among the 100 seminal businesses selected for the anniversary publication of the Edfa Documentary Canon interactive documentary booklet.
Another work that was part of Alexandra's solo exhibition was her short experience, "The Bed and Breakfast Notebook." Selected for New Contemporaries 2009 – a presenting exhibition which has been running annually since 1949 and showcases the work of emerging talent from British art schools. Studio International magazine called her film "quietly powerful political engagement", while Bloomberg's New Contemporaries president, Sasha Craddock, described it as "poetic and tender". Alexandra was mentioned in The Guardian as among “a few names to watch”. The 2009 selectors included: John Stezacker, Ellen Gallagher, Saskia Olde Wohlbers and Wolfgang Tillmans.
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Achievements and Awards
- Years in active
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