Hanna Farah-Kufer Bir'im

In his solo exhibition "Concerns (חששות)" (2014), a flower presented as photographs taken randomly, documenting his daily life, events and scenes from the social and material environment in his life, thus forming a kind of personal visual biography of the artist.

Bar'am is a fundamental experience for Farah, he testified that "I often start out as a simple cube, reminiscent of my grandfather's house." In his work, "A Model for Repair" (2010), Farah builds Bar’am on its ruins by models, etchings, various actions, video works and photographs, creating an imagined space that simultaneously coexists as memory and dream and as an explicit and practical proposal for return. Farah 's move joins a long list of community, private, artistic and legal projects initiated and initiators by the people of Kfar Bar’am in order to fight the displacement of the village' s remains and promote to return to it.

Another feature of Farah's work is the cross-referencing between what is in the case and what is intentionally created. For example, in "Shelter 5-1" (2007), Farah was asked to take refuge in the building and prepare him for daily use. After the evacuation of the place and during its cleaning, one of the walls revealed the inscription "Palestine" apparently written by a Palestinian worker who was present at the site. In the framework of the work he painted the wall and painted it white while simultaneously documenting the process of doing all its stages.

As part of his temporary invitation to work for the exhibition (2007), he was asked to return and reveal the inscription on the wall. The study raises questions such as the issue of the labor force in Israel in general and especially in the field of construction, and the fact that it is impossible to disconnect the political from the public sphere.

Farah deals with the idea of the biography of the place as a distorted, irregular and detached narrative, which no retrospective look can reconstruct or correct.  "Disrupted" (2003) series, in which he created a biographical mosaic of geographically disintegrated spaces that lies between the Kfar Bi’ram and the city of Tel Aviv-Yafo, where the Farah lives now.

In his co-operated work with artist Dina Shoham, Block (2002), the two artists appear in their work restraints, facing each other and building gray blocks, each around himself, like a fence or a wall that is rising around them. The two walls become two buildings that bury and imprison the artists. The background soundtrack of the work includes a conversation between the two artists who reflect on the Jewish-Arab and Israeli-Palestinian question as local narratives, so that the dissonance between the walls that are visible on the video and the relaxed conversation that is heard in the background is felt more strongly.

Hanna Farah-Kufer Bir'im or Hanna Fuad Farah (born 1960) is a Palestinian artist, builder and architect who lives and works in Tel Aviv-Yafo and in the village of Bir'im.

Hanna Farah was born in village of Alijiah in 1960, to a Palestinian family who displaced from Kfar Bar’am. Many of his works, photograph, print and sculpture which deal with the history of the village and attempts to resettle it. He is an artist but, also engaged in architecture and design at the same time, between 1996 and 2008 he worked on the "New Kufer Bir'im" project, and designed the exhibition of Hila Lulu Lin at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2005).

The name of the Kufer Bir'im was added to his signature as a second family name, in order to tie his identity to the village of his family, whose residents were expelled from it in 1948. The affair of the displaced people of Akrit and Bir'im was discussed extensively in the government, the Supreme Court and the Knesset, but has not yet been implemented to fulfill the promise given to the residents that they will be able to return to their villages. The addition of the name symbolizes the "indivisible identity between his geographical and physical origins and his mental location."