April 6, 2021
By Mairi Beautyman
“All my inspiration stems from my childhood experiences and cultural heritage,” reveals Hozan Zangana, who fled Iraqi Kurdistan as a teenager with his family in the 1980s. Last November, during Dubai Design Week 2020, the Netherlands-based designer presented “Fata Morgana,” a socially distanced seating installation punctuated by pillars representing the seven Emirates. Erected in the heart of the Dubai Design District (d3), the installation was the most recent pavilion in the annual Abwab series, which celebrates regional design talent. Zangana is no stranger to the competition he co-curated and designed “Excavations,” the 2016 Abwab pavilion in collaboration with Rand Abdul Jabbar.
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“Your parents leave a place, and somehow you have this deep connection to it – even if you’ve never been there, or you don’t quite understand it,” says artist Rand Abdul Jabbar about her latest project,
Every Act of Recognition Alters What Survives,
which looks at generations of diaspora.
“You’re always feeling somewhere in between. It was getting to that ‘in between’ – and opening up that conversation to other voices to see how they think about it – that allows you to start making
sense of your own experience,” she says.
The Baghdad-born artist, who lives in Abu Dhabi, is developing her new work for Shubbak