Oraib Toukan is an artist whose interdisciplinary practice spans photography, film, writing, and printed matter. Raised and shaped by the landscapes of Jordan and Palestine, her essay films, photo assemblages and texts delve into relationships between the tender and the horrific, materiality and loss, grief and meaning. While exploring the emancipatory potential of images, her gaze often wanders unexpectedly to natural phenomena; cacti, a horse’s neck or an eyelash.

Influenced by a dialogue over the years with the Palestinian pedagogue Munir Fasheh on turbeh (‘local soil’ in Arabic) and inspired by the Palestinian writer and lawyer Raja Shehadeh’s writings on sarha (to wander freely with the terrain), Toukan crafts an intimate and uniquely haptic perspective on images from what she terms their “soil grain” – reading images as topographies, and topographies as images. Things Bigger Than What Can Be Seen, published by Archive Books as part of we refuse_d, explores these symmetries and analogies and translates some of Toukan’s essays on seeing into Arabic for the first time. A composition of photographs selected from the book are presented here, and imbued with notations titled Index (Living Things).

we refuse_d is produced by Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, on the occasion of their 15th anniversary, and presented in partnership with M HKA.
Curated by Nadia Radwan and Vasıf Kortun.