Menu
The New Contemporary Art Magazine

The Sculptures and Installations of Mohamad Hafez

Artist/architect Mohamad Hafez uses found objects and scraps to craft politically and socially charged Middle Eastern streetscapes. His "UNPACKED: Refugee Baggage" series adds an audio component, with the sculptures of homes and other structures existing inside open suitcases. The narratives offered are of real people from Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Congo, and elsewhere.

Artist/architect Mohamad Hafez uses found objects and scraps to craft politically and socially charged Middle Eastern streetscapes. His “UNPACKED: Refugee Baggage” series adds an audio component, with the sculptures of homes and other structures existing inside open suitcases. The narratives offered are of real people from Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Congo, and elsewhere.

“Responding to the atrocities of the Syrian war, Hafez’s recent work depicts cities besieged by the civil war to capture the magnitude of the devastation and to expose the fragility of human life,” his site says. “However, in contrast to the violence of war, his art imbues a subtle hopefulness through its deliberate incorporation of verses from the Holy Quran. At the core of Hafez’s work, the verses offer a distinct contrast between the stark pessimistic reality of destruction and the optimistic hope for a bright future.”

Find more of Hafez’s work on his site.

Meta
Share
Facebook
Reddit
Pinterest
Email
Related Articles
One look at artist Sophie Ryder's hybrid animal sculptures and you'll be whisked away into some mystical world. "I sculpt characters and beings- the dogs, the hares, the minotaurs... are all characters beyond animal form. I am not interested in making a replica," she has said. The charming and remote cottage where she makes her work, featured here, is not far off from the fantasy that it creates. Ryder's studio is located in the countryside of Colin Valley in the Gloucestershire Cotswolds, England, a beautiful but isolated place that rarely sees visitors. On November 20th, she will open her cottage up to the public for a rare showing of her works, including sculpture, plaster works, drawings, among other pieces.
Jorge Mayet’s miniature floating sculptures serve as compelling metaphors for the artist's complex relationship to his native country. Mayet was born in Cuba, yet has been living and working in Mallorca, Spain as an expatriate. Despite the circumstances, his sculptures are devoid of any intentional political statement. Instead, they explore the artist's personal experiences with exile and displacement, and the powerful nostalgia for one's homeland left behind.
Artist and designer Daniel Arsham currently has his first show in Russia at Moscow with “Moving Architecture” at VHDNKh. His nine site-specific "architectural interventions" bring surreal, three-dimensional touches to otherwise nondescript spaces. The photographs showing Arsham's work in this piece were taken by James Law. Arsham was last mentioned on cctvta.com here.
Azerbaijani artist Faig Ahmed draws from the rich tradition of Middle Eastern carpet weaving to spin surreal creations that seem to defy physical laws — and the staticness of cultural relics. Sometimes his carpets appear to melt, their patterns dissolving into a pool of swirling colors like an oil slick, and other times they become three-dimensional, rising up in sharp spikes that defy the two-dimensional form. These are not carpets to be walked upon. Since we introduced Ahmed on the blog last May, he has created a new body of work that will debut at Cuadro Gallery in Dubai on September 14. A unique space in Dubai's financial center, Cuadro is a non-profit gallery where Ahmed recently completed an artist residency. Take a look at some photos from Ahmed's studio and his new works below.

Subscribe to the Hi-Fructose Mailing List