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.

In addition to her visual practice, Toukan is a writer and scholar pursuing a research-based practice in Berlin. Her writing draws from the rich lexicon of the Arabic language, challenging dominant narratives with more vernacular understandings of images at large, and images of struggle in particular. Her book Sundry Modernism investigates Palestinian modernism through an exploration of its cultural and political materials, expanding conversations around modernist practices beyond Eurocentric frameworks. Toukan has held academic positions at Bard College as well as the International Academy of Art, Palestine before completing her PhD at Oxford University in 2019. Her practice and research continue to contribute to critical discussions on art, language, politics and poetics.

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.