Biography

DAAR is an art and architecture collective and a residency programme based in Beit Sahour, Palestine. DAAR’s work combines discourse, spatial intervention, education, collective learning, public meetings and legal challenges. DAAR’s practice is centred on one of the most difficult dilemmas of political practice: how to act both propositionally and critically within an environment in which the political force field is so dramatically distorted. It proposes the subversion, reuse, profanation and recycling of the existing infrastructure of a colonial occupation. DAAR projects have been shown showed in various biennales and museums, among the others the Venice Biennale, Bozar, Brussels, NGBK Berlin, the Istanbul Biennial, Architecture Biennale Rotterdam, Home Works, Beirut, Architekturforum Tirol, Innsbruk, the Oslo Triennial, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris. DAAR’s members have lectured internationally including Columbia University, New York, Tate Modern, London, Global Art Forum, Dubai, the Edward Said Memorial Lecture, University of Warwick, Al Feneiq Dheisheh Refugee Camp, Bethlehem, and The Human Rights Project (Bard Collage). In 2010 it was awarded the Price Claus Prize for Architecture and shortlisted for the Chrnikov Prize.