Hanna Farah-Kufer Bir'im

Hanna Farah-Kufer Bir'im (; born 1960) or Hanna Fuad Farah, is an Israeli visual artist, builder, and architect. He lives in Tel Aviv-Yafo, and in the village of Bir'im.

Early life and education Hanna Farah was born in village of Alijiah in 1960, to an Arab family who displaced from Kafr Bir'im. He received a Bachelor of Science in 2001, and a bachelor of architecture in 2002 from WIZO Haifa Academy of Design and Education.

Work 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."

In the early photo work of a flower, there is a typical point of view: it is low, as foot-level of observer, trying to trace the place from which material and information were taken or to reveal hidden content or deviate from the agreed logic.

In later photographs, the perspective expanded - it embraces an outside or an inside of space, looking horizontally or diagonally, in a way that draws inspiration from the catalog or police photography genre.

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.

In the exhibition, he brought photographs of different times and types together - a kind of re-activation of the works through cross-language cross-word making and a matchmaking of photographs placed side by side as an unresolved puzzle. Despite his meticulous aesthetics, Farah's works transverse categories and undermine the boundaries between media, bodywork and performance, conceptual documentation and photography.

In this work, Farah analyzes the remains of the historic village and proposes planning for the future development of the place, attesting to a certain utopian dimension in his work and his perception. In the first stage of the work - mapping - Farah observes British and Israeli aerial photographs made for intelligence and military purposes and extracts the movement of the village, as well as its continuation, from a statement that "I see a photograph of life, I see the life there was and the life that can be."

Later, from the aerial photographs and the testimonies he collected, Farah reconstructs the village structure - an intimate core of houses built close to each other, mostly around a common courtyard, with plots of land owned by the residents scattered around the village at different distances. In the model that he built for the future development of the village, he reconstructs the route of the village and the relationship between the buildings and the agricultural lands, and locates the future residential area around the historical village center, so that the remnants of the old village exist within and as part of the new village.

The agricultural lands and the industrial buildings appear in the model in the second and third circles around the built-up circle of the village. According to the proposal in the village nucleus it is suggested to place the community and cultural center of the new village. Despite the circumstances of the limiting reality, Farah's proposal marks a concrete possibility both for the construction of a village and for a political settlement in which refugees will return to the places from which they were ejected or to other places to which they would return.

Prizes and awards 2007 – Prize to Encourage Creativity, The Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport 2003 – Pais Lottery grant for Kufer Birim Project

Group exhibitions 2011 – Towards Return of Palestinian Refugees, Zochrot Gallery, Tel Aviv- Jaffa 2010– Stop Making Sense, Oslo, Oslo Kunstforening/Oslo Fine Art Society 2009 – For the tree of the field is man's life, 2009 – Espace culturel Memoire de I'Avenir, Paris 2009 – The Thousand and One Nights, Postmasters Gallery, NYC, NY 2009 – Landsc®ape: Representation Matrixes, Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Petach Tikva 2008 – Correspondence Contemporary Arab Artists, Revealing another Reality, 2008 – The Museum for Islamic Art, Jerusalem 2008 – The Jerusalem show, Al Ma'mal Foundation for Contemporary Art, Jerusalem 2008 – Prizes in Art and Design from the Ministry of Science' Culture and Sport, 2007, 2008 – Haifa Museum of Art 2007 – Temporally, The Israeli Center for Digital Art, Holon 2007 – Wanderings in the Print Space, The Print Workshop, Jerusalem 2007 – Desert Generation, The Kibbutz Art Gallery, Tel Aviv 2007 – See Not\ Fear Not, Umm el- Fahem Art Gallery, Umm el- Fahem 2006 – Bread, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem 2006 – Mini Israel, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem 2006 – Biographies, Six Solo Exhibitions, Hagar Art Gallery, Jaffa 2005 – Play- Ground, ‘Beit Hagefen’ The Arab-Jewish Center, Haifa 2004 – Utopia, ‘Beit Hagefen’ The Arab-Jewish Center, Haifa 2003 – Officespace: Art on Site 2, 16 Ha Arba’ah Street, Tel Aviv 2003 – Israeli Object - A Matter of Time, Artists’ House, Jerusalem; Science Museum, Haifa 2003 – Black/White, Beit Hagefen, Haifa; Artists’ House, Jerusalem; Science Museum, Haifa 2003 – The Situation Now - the book, 40 authors’ and artists’ perspective on the 2003 – current events in Israel, Kinneret Publication 2003 – Platform Against the War, Jaffa Cultural Center, Jaffa 2003 – Young Graduates/Veteran Graduates, The New Gallery, WIZO College of Design, Haifa 2001 – Improvisation, The Escola Design Gallery, Tel Aviv 2000 – Israeli Design, Ganei Hata’arucha [Exhibition Grounds], Tel Aviv 1998 – The Shadow, The Ministry of Culture and Education, Jerusalem