Alaa Abu Asad

Alaa Abu Asad’s practice is centred around developing, or rather experiencing alternative trajectories where values of (re)presentation, translation, viewing, reading, and understanding intersect. These multilayered concerns on the essence of the artwork, its production, and its politics, stimulate Alaa’s ways of seeing, together with other aesthetical matters of how to juxtapose static photographs with moving images (video) and (written/outspoken) texts. How can these concerns comprehensively convey personal and common experience/s of the individual and the collective, without ignoring actual events and (past) histories that shape memory?

Alaa lives and works between the Netherlands and Palestine. He received a BFA from the Department of Photography at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, and an MA from the Dutch Art Institute (DAI) in the Netherlands. He worked as an assistant curator for the UNRWA audiovisual archive exhibition The Long Journey in Jerusalem, and for the Palestinian Museum between 2015-2016. His work has featured in Alfilm - Arab Film Festival Berlin; 5th Cairo Video Festival - Video Art & Experimental Films, Medrar, Cairo;  /Si:n/ Festival, Ramallah;  All the Other Lovers, 98 Weeks/Project Space, Beirut; Young Artist of the Year Award (YAYA 2018), A.M. Qattan Foundation, Ramallah; Toronto Palestine Film Festival (TPFF) and others. Alaa was a 2022/2023 Fellow at the TXT department, Gerrit Rietveld Academie (NL) and a 2020 resident at the post graduate Jan van Eijck Academie in Maastricht. 

Learn more about Alaa's 20 minute presentation I love it when translation can be found to agree with our weird desires together with Ulufer Çelik for CONSTANT CRAVING ~ PERFORMING UNDER CONDITIONS - DAI's 3 day lectures marathon at State of Concept in Athens, June 2018. 

Learn more about Alaa Abu Asad’s written MA thesis (DAI, 2018): Photography and the Representation of the Palestinian

Alaa returned to DAI in a variety of roles: as Kitchen respondent, as administrative assistant and most recently as the photographer of the Alumni Embassy generation 2022 portraits.

Learn more about Alaa’s "Life after DAI" by means of his website