Raeda SAADEH, Palestine

Born in 1977. Lives and works in Jerusalem.

Photographer, installation and performance artist Raeda Saadeh was born in Umm Al-Fahem, Palestine. She received her BFA and MFA from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, and spent one year as an exchange student at the School of Visual Arts in New York. She has been awarded the bronze Chimera at ICASTICA the first International Arezzo Biennial of Art (2013); and the “Young Artist of the Year” prize by the AM Qattan Foundation, Ramallah (2000). 

Her work is in the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Fonds Regional d’Art Contemporain de Lorraine, Metz, France; and Magasin – Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble, France.

”The occupying force has many facets: it can take the shape of physical tangible realities of the everyday, such as in a wall of concrete, a fence, a checkpoint, a curfew, a barrier of stone – or it can reassign it’s force unto a face of a child, a home, a language, and cultural, traditional expectations. There are limitations on her personal freedom as well: the woman, the mother, the lover, the guide, the protector. She seeks justice and longs for change. She is not blind to the opponents around her and pushes forward with enduring strength – and at times, she feels that it is almost as if she has to assume a sort of madness in her behavior so that she can live unharmed by oppression, in an attempt to always protect those she loves from negative forces of fear.”