Qais Assali is an artist, designer and educator based in Chicago and Houston and raised in Palestine and the UAE. His interdisciplinary art practice engages with issues of time and memory, collective trauma, and diaspora related to current events and his own identity.  The exhausted, all in and shattered map(s) of Palestine overlapped here on several fabric surfaces. A desire to materially translate the displacement of the Palestinian land, a pattern of multiple shapes and times and “what remains”. “You Want It Darker” centers a crop of an infographic section taken from an edge of a locally distributed map of Palestine, produced during the first Intifada, to inform the reshaping of the land
or what remains within greater Palestine.

Assali received a BFA in Contemporary Visual Art from the International Academy of Art Palestine (2017) before continuing on to receive two master’s degrees, a MFA from Bard College, NY and a MA in Art Education from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2018).  He has lectured internationally, and was recently the Visiting Assistant Professor for the Critical Race Studies Residency Program at Michigan State University (2018-19). He is currently a Fellow and Artist-in-Residence for the Core Residency Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.  His work has been included in solo and group exhibitions internationally at institutions including the Chicago Cultural Center; Rashid Diab Arts Centre, Khartoum; SculptureCenter, New York, Jeune Création, Paris; and Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo.

Courtesy of the artist