Station Point

In the exhibition ‘Station Point’, the architect Saba Innab explores the architecture of refugee camps through drawings, architectural models and texts. This leads to questions about the concepts of space, time, power and survival. How can you build without land? What does temporary exile mean for people who don’t know what will happen to them next? What happens when an initially temporary situation becomes permanent? The exhibition is a continuation of Innab’s research. She examines how the understanding of temporary living becomes more and more complicated when it meets processes of modernization and modernity in the host countries of the refugees. A central question of ‘Station Point’ is what modernity and its canon look like when seen from the point of view of a temporary situation that has become a permanent condition.

Drawing on her practice as an architect, Innab points out that architecture is complicit with power and its structures. In her artistic work she criticizes this system and examines the tensions between building and living, between architecture and lived spatial experience. Her formal and theoretical research is based on a process of collecting: Innab collects different patterns of ‘temporary living’, architectural archetypes, methods of construction and knowledge that geographically and territorially cover or stake out a particular area.

The exhibition ‘Station Point’ was developed by Omar Berrada during his residency in Berlin in cooperation with Innab. It is one of four exhibitions of the programme focus ‘Movement.Bewegung’ in the three-year project ‘Untie to Tie’ at the ifa Gallery Berlin.

Curator

Omar Berrada is a writer and curator. He is director of Dar al-Ma'mûn, a library and artist's residency in Marrakech. Berrada lives in New York and teaches at The Cooper Union, where he co-organizes the IDS Public Lecture Series.

Artist

Saba Innab is a Jordanian-Palestinian artist and architect. Her personal experience with diaspora and her participation as a young architect in the United Nations-sponsored reconstruction of the refugee camp Nahr al-Bared in Lebanon have shaped her work.

About "Curators in Residence" of KfW Stiftung

Omar Berrada is a grant-holder of the programme "Curators in Residence" of KfW Stiftung in cooperation with ifa. The programme offers curators from Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia the opportunity to spend three months in Berlin, thus promoting intercultural and discursive exchange in exhibition organisation. The residency’s purpose is to raise critical awareness of postcolonial discourses and encourage intellectual engagement with cultural heritage.