Rabab Ghazoul

b. 1970, Mosul, Iraq
Lives and works in Cardiff, Wales

Rabab Ghazoul, Help Skinner, 2016
Rabab Ghazoul, Help Skinner, 2016

Rabab Ghazoul began making experimental theatre in Wales in the 1990s, working as a director and later as a performer. Her work now incorporates video, installation, text, performance and site-specific work.

Rabab Ghazoul is a socially-engaged artist whose work explores points of contact between systems of power and individual agency, voices that are yet to speak, spaces of in-between-ness, and the body politic. For Intermission, she’ll be excavating the archive that comprises two decades worth of her own personal and creative notebooks. The intention is to revisit and curate these materials, so as to generate prompts that can inform a new set of conversations with her immediate neighbours. Concurrently, she will explore reflections around the etymology of the word ‘curate’ which, dating back to the Latin for care – ‘cura’ – evolved through the religious art of the Middle Ages, into ‘curatus’ – the care of the soul.
Rabab was born and spent her childhood in Iraq. This experience of living in two cultures informs her approach as a social observer and commentator, producing work along a variety of themes – politics, history, territory, community, homeland – that draw her both into and beyond the realms of cultural identity and personal narrative. Often reflecting upon the effects of the late capitalist culture through which we continue to enact our prescribed and ritualistic movements, her work is interested in locating the ‘truthfulness’ amidst the ongoing construction and consumption of private and public texts.

Recent work includes The Suitcase Project (2007) at Beaver Arts (Copenhagen, Denmark), and This Edible Map as part of the Gresol Festival of Art, Girona, Spain. In 2008 her solo show Can't Keep Up With Keeping You Down was shown at both Chapter Arts Centre and Pontcanna Fields Allotments, Cardiff.

The artist was in the following exhibitions:
On leaving and arriving
If.... Rabab Ghazoul
Intermission 2020
This artist is featured in:
It Was Never Going To Be Straightforward


Links :
http://www.axisweb.org/ofSARF.aspx?SELECTIONID=19470
  • Rabab Ghazoul, Active Endeavour, 2010
  • Rabab Ghazoul, It`s a Long Way Back, 2015/16
  • Rabab Ghazoul, Help Skinner, 2016
  • Rabab Ghazoul, Mao Hope March, 2009
  • Rabab Ghazoul, Eight TextsFor The Revolution, 2020