About Samir Harb Art
I’m an architect and geographer who works through drawing, printmaking and comics.
My work grows from a love of landscape: valleys, olive trees, stone walls, terraced fields, and how they hold both beauty and pain. Much of it comes from memory and longing for a land under pressure. These are not pictures of a place so much as ways of staying close to it.
Comics are where that becomes an argument. To construct a narrative is to claim power over it, and the page decides what is seen, in what order, and who is speaking.
Printmaking is how I stay connected, to the land and to myself. Many prints draw on two crafts that sit close to the skin: embroidery and tattooing. Stitched lines on fabric and inked lines on the body both carry stories, care and resilience. The marks in my prints echo those gestures.I work across disciplines through the graphic novel: architecture, art, ethnography and political activism. My work has been exhibited and published internationally. From 2023 to 2025, I convened the Graphic Research Working Group at the Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where researchers and artists met to draw from fieldnotes and build graphic narratives out of research.
Every print is hand-made in my own studio.
Note: Listed here is my art and architecture work. Academic publications are on Google Scholar.
Books
2023 · Shi’rab: Al-‘Ubūr min al-dihlīz — Khan Aljanub
A work of comic-music fiction made with the musician StromTrap, funded by Al-Mawred.
2017 · Morbid Symptoms, with M. Cabell and N. Perugini — Sharjah Biennial 13, Ramallah
Publications
2025 · The Exhausted, with E. Distretti — e-flux Architecture, Palestinian Repairs
2025 · Your silence is loud — Otherwise, the Graphic issue. English and Arabic
2020 · Anna Gréki (آنا غريكي) — comic on the poetry of Anna Gréki, Khatt30
2021 · A New Imaginary of Continuity — Cypher 10, Front Line Defenders
2018 · Une case vide — Le Monde diplomatique, Manière de voir 157
2016 · Ramallah’s Mukataa: an Architectural Colonial Object — The Funambulist 6
2015 · Days of Void — Akademie Schloss Solitude
2012 · [Arch]comicologies: How to Construct a Narrative — South as a State of Mind
2010 · The Red Castle — Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency, Palestine
2009 · Comics — c-left.blogspot.com
2007–08 · O Ba3den — independent free-press magazine, Ramallah
Exhibitions and projects
2023 · The Territory is not a Map — Salonul de proiecte, Bucharest
2017 · Shifting Ground, Sharjah Biennial 13 Offsite — Ramallah
2015 · at the moment of change there is always a new threshold of imagination — Artspace, Auckland
2014 · Future Scenarios with an Open End — Akademie Schloss Solitude and Künstlerhaus Stuttgart
2014 · The Landscape of Battir vs. the State of Israel — illustration. The presentation of the “wall” in Battir before the Israeli High Court. Exhibited in Forensis at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, and reproduced in Frieze.
2014 · Knock on the Roof: Drone Strike in Beit Lahiya — research. Investigation into warning strikes with the Palestinian NGO Al Mezan, for the UN Special Rapporteur’s report on drone warfare. Exhibited in Forensis, HKW. https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/knock-on-the-roof-drone-strike-in-beit-lahiya
2013 · Violence at the Threshold of Detectability — architectural modelling. Presented to the UN General Assembly by Ben Emerson, UN Special Rapporteur for Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights, and in legal action before the UK Court of Appeal. Contributor, FORENSIS: The Architecture of Public Truth
(2014) and Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability (2017)
2014 · Forensic, Forensic Architecture — Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin
2014 · The Oral History of Picasso in Palestine — Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin
2011 · We Have Woven the Motherlands with Nets of Iron — Giza Train Station and Amman
2010 · The Lawless Line, Decolonizing Architecture — Sharjah Biennial 10
2010 · The Red Castle and the Lawless Line, Decolonizing Architecture — 0047, Oslo
2009 · HIV+ What Happens Next?, with PonteRadio — Ferrara
2009 · Finding Palestine: History and Paths of a Land — Rome
2008 · Palestina in nuvole, Komikazen Festival of Reality Comics — Ravenna
2007–10 · Nero, Bianco, Rosso, with PonteRadio — Jenin, Berlin, Tyre, Ravenna, Venice Biennale
2007 · RIWAQ Second Biennale, organising team — Ramallah
Talks
2026 · Cement Entanglements — Die Angewandte, Vienna
2015 · The Archeology of Counterinsurgency, with N. Perugini and M. Cabell — PARSE Biennial Conference “Time”, University of Gothenburg
2013 · Eluding the Surface: From an Image of a State to the State of Utopia — Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre, Ramallah
On my work
2025 · Ink that Persists: Palestinian Comics against Oblivion — IEMed, Quaderns de la Mediterrània 38. Features Protests of Jerusalem
Meet the Author: Samir Harb — interview, Otherwise
2019 · Comics Artists and Collectives Decolonising Cities across the Global South — Discover Society
Panels for Peace: Contributions of Israeli and Palestinian Comics to Peace-Building — Quest, CDEC Journal
Dominic Davies, Urban Comics: Infrastructure and the Global City in Contemporary Graphic Narratives
Workshops
2008–09 · Express Yourself by Comics — primary schools in Italy and Palestine, with PonteRadio
Fellowship
2014 · Architecture Fellowship, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart
Education
PhD Geography — University of Manchester
MA — Goldsmiths, University of London
BSc Architectural Engineering — Birzeit University