Ala Younis

Ala YOUNIS is an artist who trained as an architect in Amman. Her practice focuses heavily on research as well as curating, collaboration, film, and book projects. Her projects deal with collective experiences that collapse into personal ones, and with how archives play on predilections, and their lacunas and mishaps manipulate the imagination. Her work has been featured in solo shows in Amman, London, Seville, Prague, Sharjah, Dubai, and New York. She has also taken part in the Istanbul and Gwangju Biennials; and the New Museum Triennial, New York. In 2013, she curated Kuwait’s first national pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale and co-founded the publishing and research initiative Kayfa ta. She is a member of the Advisory Board of Berlinale’s Forum Expanded and of the Academy of Arts of the World, Cologne. High Dam (2016– ) is a multi-disciplinary body of work that presents factual and audio-visual elements from the reverse paths of several creative works on the High Dam. These elements offer insights into the processes that governed the politics of the era, particularly the propaganda apparatus of the UAR and the USSR, and the tricks their makers resorted to when their work did not fit the states’ vision.