Biography
As Artist activists, Ayren Anastas and long-time collaborator René Gabri have explored issues of space, politics, language and often, Palestine. In Disorientation II, they presented What Everyone Knows(2006), a video installation that explores the lives lived by Palestinians in occupied Palestine and in Israel.
Anastas and Gabri were among the principal organisers of 16 Beaver Group, a New York artist community space founded in 1999. Their work together includes The Meaning of Everything. One Step Forward Two Steps Back (2010) and Camp Campaign (2006), RadioActive Discussions (2002), United We Stand (2003). Their films have been shown widely including at the Beirut Art Center, Beirut (2009) and Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, UK (2009). Their book, The Meaning of Everything, Vol. 1, was published in 2009 by Paraguay Press, Paris.
Solo projects by Anastas include Pasolini Pa* Palestine (2004) which was filmed during a residency at the Al-Ma’mal Foundation, Jerusalem and shown at Hebbel Theatre, Berlin (2006) and Homeworks III, Beirut (2005), and m* of Bethlehem (2003) which was screened at the Argos Festival, Brussels (2005) and CCA Glasgow, (2005).
Born in Bethlehem, Anastas moved to Germany in 1989 for a DAAD scholarship. She lived in Berlin until 1996 where she studied architecture at the Berlin Technical University. In 1999 she moved to New York where she has since lived and taught at the School of Architecture, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn.
October 2010
Based on text from publication for Disorientation II: The Rise and Fall of Arab Cities, 2009
This person was part of Sharjah Biennial 8 and 12.
Related
In the absence of the objects seen
The work of Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri engages questions of the human condition amid a world of increasing speed, scale, automation and accumulation by dispossession.
Sharjah Biennial 12: The past, the present, the possible
This publication is a guide for visitors of Sharjah Biennial 12: The past, the present, the possible.
What Everybody Knows
Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri travelled together through Palestine and Israel, searching, researching and witnessing ‘the situation’, and created a series of videos that document their encounters.
MM 2015: memories of our underdevelopment, a symposium
memories of our underdevelopment, a symposium takes the form of an arabesque—interwoven motifs, which together form a composition. The three motifs are: the arabesque itself (in the shadows of Said's Orientalism); the binary of development/ underdevelopment and the past, the present, the potential.
