Artist Spotlight: Dima Srouji

Q. How has your background in architecture influenced the way you treat landscapes as living archive?

Dima Srouji: It's not architecture that has influenced the way I understand landscape. It's my background, being from the region, that has sculpted that perspective. The land is a layered history of a continuous and accumulated culture, and my practice tries to capture knots along that deep thread.

Architectural education did teach me to understand traces, to read what remains and what has been built over, and that has sharpened the way I look. But the impulse that land is a living archive came first intuitively.

Q. Your work deals with the colonial history of archaeology; how do you try to decolonise the way we look at artefacts and the soil they come from?

Srouji: I'm cautious about the word decolonise in this context because it can flatten what is actually a set of very specific and ongoing violences. What I try to do in my practice is more particular than a general critique of colonial archaeology. I try to recover specific erasures. It’s an active practice rather than one that shifts perspective from colonial to decolonial.

The excavation of Palestinian archaeological sites has almost always involved the suppression of Palestinian intellectual and physical labour. Similarly, the glass vessels that have ended up in museum collections across Europe and North America were made by traditions still alive in Palestinian villages. The distance between an object classified as a Roman artefact in a Western institution and a vessel made by the same techniques in Jaba' and Hebron today is not a distance of time or quality. It is a distance produced by colonial acquisition and the value systems that justify it.

So my approach is to work closely, with specific objects, specific archives, specific soils, and to ask very precise questions about how they arrived where they are and whose labour and knowledge produced them.

Q. In your work with ancient crafts like glassblowing, how does reviving traditional techniques serve as a way to reclaim heritage that has been displaced?

Srouji: My relationship to glass has always been more complicated than that. When I first encountered the glassblowers of Jaba' while working with Riwaq in the West Bank, the tradition was not extinct. It was active, constrained, and largely invisible to the institutions that claim authority over the region's material heritage.

What interested me was not preservation for its own sake but the question of value. The same glass traditions that produced vessels now held in museum collections across Europe and North America are still alive in Palestinian hands. Working with those hands, and later making deliberate replicas of displaced objects held in institutions like the V&A, was a way of asking what makes one object a priceless artefact and another a forgery. The answer is almost always colonial in its logic.

The glass practice is less about reclaiming a displaced heritage and more about exposing the mechanisms of that displacement, and insisting that the living tradition carries as much weight as the excavated one.

Q. You often use replicas or ‘forgeries' in your art; how does creating these objects help you navigate the reality of original artefacts being held in distant institutions?

Srouji: The word forgery already does a lot of ideological work before you even make the object. It assumes there is an original whose authority is beyond question, held somewhere legitimate, by someone with the right to hold it. My practice starts by questioning those assumptions.

When I made replicas of Roman-era glass vessels from Greater Syria for the Ghosts series, I was working with objects that sit in museum collections across Europe, classified as ancient artefacts, protected and valued accordingly. The same glass traditions that produced those vessels are still alive in Palestine. The glassblowers of Jaba' have been making vessels by related techniques for generations, and much of what they produce for the tourist market is already classified informally as forgeries of ancient pieces. That word is applied to their living labour while the excavated originals sit behind glass in institutions that acquired them under colonial conditions.

Making deliberate replicas and placing them on pedestals alongside the originals is a way of making that contradiction visible and physical. It asks the viewer to feel the instability of the distinction, to stand in front of two objects and ask what exactly separates them, and to follow that question toward the political and economic systems that produce the answer.

Q. For your work in we refuse_d, how do you use the concept of refusal to challenge the way historical narratives about Palestine are traditionally told?

Srouji: The Jaffa project starts from a document that history largely ignored: a master plan commissioned in 1946 by Youssef Haykal, the last Palestinian mayor of Jaffa, to the British-trained Egyptian architect Ali Al-Meligy Massoud. The plan was an attempt to present Jaffa as "modern" and "civilised" to the British Mandate authorities, a last effort to argue for the city's right to remain Palestinian.

What the work tries to hold onto is the irony embedded in that gesture. By adopting the coloniser's own definition of modernity, the plan already contained the logic of its own erasure. Traditional historical narratives about Palestine tend to frame this period through inevitability, as though what happened was the only possible outcome. Working with a plan that was never built insists on the contingency of that history, on the fact that other futures were imagined, drawn, and refused by force. The work does not mourn the plan. It uses it as evidence that Palestinian political and architectural imagination was active, sophisticated, and deliberately suppressed.

Q. How do you approach the idea of ‘unrealised' architectural plans as a way to imagine a different future for the Palestinian landscape?

Srouji: My interest in these plans is not speculative in the sense of fantasy. I’m interested in this unrealised history in a more mechanical sense. I want to understand what was possible, what was prevented, and by what mechanisms. The gap between a plan and its realisation in the Palestinian context is almost always a political gap, a record of intervention and refusal by forces external to the community being planned for. These plans are evidence that imagination preceded erasure, that Palestinian architects, mayors, and communities were actively thinking about their own futures in sophisticated and sovereign terms. What remains is the gap of what could have been. It’s an imagination of an alternative past rather than a future. In the current circumstance, unfolding genocide and encroaching settlers in the West Bank, it is difficult to consider the future.

Q. The 4000 year-old St. Helena Tunnel is largely missing from the global awareness of Gaza's heritage. How do the engravings in Time Reclaiming Structures—your work from the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025—bring these hidden, underground histories to light for visitors?

Srouji: The work takes that space seriously as an architectural and human fact, and transforms it into something that also holds memory, contemplation, and heritage. The ceilings carry the topographies of Gaza's natural terrain. The structure is monumental from outside and intimate within, a shelter that is also a small museum, a chapel, a space of decompression. The project understands the tunnels as critical infrastructure of the primary architectural function- shelter.

Read about Dima Srouji’s work at we refuse_d and learn more about the artist herself here. Plan your visit to Mathaf today.