Rana Hamadeh

Rana Hamadeh (born 1983) is an artist from Lebanon based in the Netherlands. Her interdisciplinary projects span theatrical performances, sound, text and cartographic works, among others, allowing for a discursive approach to subject matter.

Artwork Many of her works question the authority of historical voice, creating visibility around erased or unrecorded voices. As part of her artistic practice she has embraced the role of scientist, historian or archivist as a means of replicating the authority that those systems relay. In 2017, her opera project The Ten Murders of Josephine used the space of Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art to spatially stage this Libretto. This exhibition allowed for the staged work to remain unfixed as the additions of the movement of staff and visitors as well as the creation of new objects in space coalesced towards its final production. The next iteration of the work premiered at the Theater Rotterdam in December 2017. With the libretto, Hamadeh returns to an artistic methodology, namely through emotion and poetry, to "explore(s) the workings of testimonial utterance as a means to rethink legal subject hood and to disrupt with that the centrality of citizenship." Mousse Magazine, Wall Street International, among others.

Stephanie Bailey of Ibraz described Hamadeh's 2013 work, Alien Encounters, as "stories, conversations, historical documents and other objects and artifacts – meteorite pieces from various parts of the world, for instance, or various coal scrip tokens used in the American South, as well as a plantation token used in Guatemala – that worked together to produce a networked constellation of meaning and association, united by the themes of hygiene, immunization and quarantine throughout history".

Jesi Khadivi of Frieze, reviewing The Ten Murders of Josephine commented, "For nearly a decade, the Lebanon-born artist’s research- and performance-based practice has questioned the infrastructures of justice, militarism, histories of sanitation and theatre." Khadavi describes the performance as consisting of "a 40-minute sound- and text-based opera, which loops through the building’s dim, violet-lit second floor", noting "processes of translation and reordering articulate a shifting hierarchy of voices. However, such references are layered, distorted and coded beyond comprehension."