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Duke University is hosting five Israeli Jewish, Palestinian and Druze artists for a six-week residency aimed at developing understanding through the creation of artistic works from their unique and shared perspectives.
The artists, graduate students at Givat Haviva, The Center for a Shared Society in Israel, will engage with Duke students, create and exhibit art on and off campus, and visit arts venues and arts organizations throughout the Triangle region.
The residency was organized by the Provost’s Initiative on the Middle East, an ongoing effort to make space in the Duke campus community for rigorous and respectful debate in which differing perspectives are welcome on current and past conflicts in the region, with support from the Office of the Vice Provost for the Arts and the Charles H. Revson Foundation.
Artist Bios and Works
maria khateb
Maria Khatib, 27, from Kafr Kanna, holds a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in Visual Arts Education from Oranim College, where she completed her graduate studies with distinction. Maria is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice includes sculpture, reliefs, video art, engraving, painting, botanical-artistic research, and a specialization in working with plasticine. She currently works as a sculpture lecturer, an elementary school art teacher, a guide at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and conducts courses in her private studio. In her artistic work, Maria explores her family’s history and how its legacy impacts her as a fourth-generation descendant of the Nakba. She deconstructs the Palestinian national narrative through orally transmitted family stories, reassembling it from a personal perspective. As a continuation of a research project that began at Givat Haviva, Maria will investigate the plant life surrounding the studio in which she will be working, using botanical printmaking techniques. Additionally, she also plans to research symbols connected to the Palestinian narrative, as well as those of the Indigenous peoples of the United States, with a particular focus on the tribes of North Carolina, through a series of plasticine-based sculptural works.
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jonathan david
I am a composer, guitarist, and sound artist based in New York. My work explores the boundaries between sound, improvisation, and physical space. I often use physical computing to deepen sonic experiences and present sound through visual and sculptural forms. My music and projects span cross-disciplinary collaborations in dance, film, immersive installations, and contemporary music.
Recent works include Low Noise – High Output, an interactive sound installation, and In the Corner of the Eye, a concert piece for string quartet, electronics, electric guitar, and recorder, commissioned by the Israeli Lottery Cultural Council and the Rabinovitch Foundation.
I’m a recipient of the America-Israel Cultural Foundation scholarship and was awarded first prize in Israel’s National Composition Competition (2023). My works have been performed and exhibited internationally at festivals, galleries, and interdisciplinary stages such as Festivalt 2025, Tranås at the Fringe, CWU New Music Festival, Stockholm Fringe Festival, and more.
Currently, I’m collaborating with Malak Manzour on a project that blends physical sculptures with embedded sound systems and sensors. Our project centers on the theme of “dreams”—creating an interactive cave-like space, where people can share their dreams in every sense of the word. These shared experiences are live recorded and then transmitted into a separate sculpture.
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BEN ALON
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My practice operates within urban spaces and private interiors, gathering overlooked daily objects and transforming them through the camera’s gaze. I treat photography as a sculptural process that begins in the moment of photographing and unfolds into space, where the embodied experience of image-making shapes the installation of the work. Working across Tel Aviv-Jaffa and other locations, I trace the friction between private memory and public space—where personal histories intersect with commercial facades, transit zones, and architectural remnants. The street becomes a site of latent poetics, where shadows, signage, and debris organize themselves into charged arrangements that mirror psychological states and power relations embedded in the built environment. Objects that carry no inherent charge become loaded with violence, sexuality, and tension through the photographic process.I am currently developing “Soft Drinks,” a series that explores elements of violence within Israeli space by positioning charged imagery precisely where the eye is unprepared to encounter them: inside the home, inside the body, within familiar habits. The work examines how ordinary objects can transform into tools with meanings beyond their
“Haviva” is a book measuring 24 by 16 cm. The book is structured in a uniform pattern, juxtaposing two adjacent vertical images photographed in Givat Haviva during the residency period. These juxtapositions reveal the resilience of Givat Haviva in the face of the difficulties in preserving a space that gives a home to a large number of entities with different goals.
The book offers a glimpse into the fusion of different ideologies and presents the survival of matter as evidence of a final human spirit.
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malak manzour
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I’m a multidisciplinary artist and poet, born in 1996 and currently living in the village of Isfiya on Mount Carmel.
My work is deeply personal but also reaches into the collective — I explore themes like dreams, reincarnation, mythology, nature, femininity, and my own Druze identity.
Dreams are central to my process. For me, they are like maps — they carry messages, warnings, blessings, and deep memory. I started keeping a dream journal during my studies at the University of Haifa, and that practice became a way to understand myself — and eventually, to connect with others.
Some dreams repeat themselves — like images of teeth acting on their own, or deer that show up again and again — and these become symbols I work with in my art, sometimes as self-portraits.
I also draw a lot from nature. I spend time walking in the forests near my home, where I often encounter animals that feel like messengers. Those moments — physical, emotional, sometimes even spiritual — find their way into my sculptures, paintings, and writing. For me, creating is not just about making something beautiful. It’s about being honest. It’s about staying loyal to what I feel, even when it’s uncomfortable.
My work spans across several mediums — I paint, sculpt, and sometimes create installations. I work mostly with oil on canvas, graphite, and ceramics. I also use natural or raw materials like wood, cotton, bones, or dried flowers — depending on the piece and the message.
Sometimes I work in the studio, but often I create in nature itself — I like being close to the earth, and letting the materials guide me.
My process is emotional and intuitive — I start with a dream, a memory, or even just a strong feeling, and slowly build from there. I believe that art should carry spirit, not just technique.
In the end, I see my art as a meeting point — between intellect and instinct, between memory and presence, between the inner world and the outer one.
I also will be working in collaboration with Jonathan on a project that explores the space between sound, sculpture, and shared experience. At the start, we’ll be “putting out fires” — small poetic interventions across campus — as a way to invite students at Duke to participate and contribute their dreams. These dreams, in every sense of the word, will become part of the installation: interactive sculptures embedded with sensors and sound, transmitting and holding these shared inner worlds. It’s a way of building a living archive — one that listens, responds, and speaks back.
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Baylasan Marjieh Karim
I’m an artist and independent researcher with a background in archaeology. My practice moves between studio work and fieldwork —whether that means digging through old archives or reinterpreting cultural fragments through sculpture and print.’m especially interested in how the past continues to shape the present, and how memory—both personal and collective—can be preserved through art.
I’m also the founder of Maqha, a community-based artist residency and art club. It’s housed inside a café that doubles as a shared studio space—where artists, thinkers, and neighbors gather. On Sundays, we open it up for collective making, talks, or just sharing space. Maqha is rooted in the idea that art shouldn’t be isolated from daily life or community—it’s something to be lived with.
My work explores the intersections of memory, history, and identity through the materiality of paper and ink. Drawing on both personal and collective narratives, I use these accessible materials to engage with stories that have been fragmented, buried, or deliberately erased. My artistic practice is deeply influenced by archaeology—not as a formal discipline, but as a way of thinking. I’m interested in what gets preserved, what gets lost, and what we choose to reconstruct. Ancient symbols, mythologies, and artifacts often appear in my work alongside contemporary and familiar narratives. The piece presented here, Self-Portrait: Thieba, is a photographic print and gel transfer on paper featuring myself and my great- grandfather. It reflects my ongoing interest in tracing lineage and memory—connecting personal history to broader cultural and historical frameworks. In recent years, I’ve expanded my practice to include paper mâché, using shredded legal documents as both medium and message. These materials, once filled with the weight of personal and legal struggles, are reformed into sculptures that carry mythological and ancestral references—goddesses, temples, serpents, and Levantine motifs. I see this transformation as both an act of resistance and a form of healing. Among the historical and spiritual figures I’ve explored is Al-Hallaj, the Sufi mystic, whose story I revisited through a series of works examining language, devotion, and the cost of speaking truth. Across my projects, I aim to create work that bridges past and present —inviting viewers to consider the legacies we inherit, challenge, and remake.
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