The Fann À Porter gallery in Dubai has arranged Non-Key-Frame, a solo exhibition by Palestinian artist Khaled Jarada that presents his sketch-like drawings. The show will be open to the public until the 30th of July, 2024.
The exhibition’s title refers to a notion from the world of the moving image. Key-frames define a scene. They defy movement, marking its starting and ending points. These frames are typically the most important ones, which receive significant attention and detail from creators. What is in between is more improvised. Non-Key-Frames are sometimes called in-between-frames or intermediate frames, which fill the gaps between two crucial moments and are defined only through an external reference.
This concept mirrors certain historiographical practices that reduce history to key-moments, key figures, key geographies, and key cultures. In Non-Key-Frame, Khaled Jarada challenges this rigid hierarchy by highlighting overlooked and everyday moments, places, objects, and figures, elevating them to a status worthy of display, appreciation, and idealisation.
Jarada’s exhibited art pieces portray figures that seem imbalanced, anxious, and out of place. The in-betweenness in these compositions is not only temporal: they are also rather spatial. In his works, Jarada explores the discomfort of in-betweenness as he became out of place in exile.
About the artist
Khaled Jarada (b. 1996, Gaza, Palestine) is a visual artist and children’s book illustrator, who earned a bachelor’s degree in Information Technology – Multimedia from Palestine University (Gaza). Currently residing in France, he has been a member of AA-E (Agency for Artists in Exile) since 2021. In his practice, which involves drawing, animation, and graphic storytelling, Jarada focuses on the issues of identity, memory, and the human body.
The artist has participated in a number of local and international exhibitions, including Musée Sahab (the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2024); Tomorrow’s Memory (the German Cultural Center, Ramallah, 2022); Lights on Gaza (the Les Amarres Center, Paris, France, 2022); Art Now (Gallery One, Ramallah, 2021); and Color of this World (the Tamer Institute, Ramallah, 2019). Jarada has undertaken residencies at the Festival Ciné-Palestine (Paris, 2024), La Filleuse (Reims, France, 2022), and the Spanish Royal Academy (Rome, Italy, 2021). He also completed an artistic residency at the Qattan Foundation (Ramallah) in 2020, where he displayed his project Metres.
In 2020, the artist received the second prize at the video art festival by the French Institute in Palestine. Additionally, he won the second award of the Gaza Video Festival and the first award of the Digital November Festival by the French Cultural Institute in Jerusalem.
To get more information about Non-Key-Frame, please visit the official web page of the show.
You might also be interested in looking at Shahid, an installation by Khalid Albaih which is on view at Mathaf.
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