R O U N D  W E A T H E R

Of Land and Language exhibits paintings Ḥarb made while she transitioned from Palestine to Oakland, which offers her another window onto the relationship between indigenous peoples and their land.  The paintings were completed during and after her time at Mills College, where she obtained an MFA in Book Art & Creative Writing.  As a teacher of Arabic, Ḥarb’s art often explores messages derived from characters in the Arabic alphabet.  Specifically, she draws inspiration from the muqaṭṭa’āt (mysterious letters), combinations of between one and five Arabic letters that open 29 of the 114 chapters of the Qurān and whose meaning is widely theorized and inconclusively open.  Ḥarb’s one-of-a-kind painted book NŪN, which removes every letter from the Qurān besides nūn, and her paintings and performance art seek to speak the language these mysterious letters themselves might speak, both in their visual and phonetic expressions, how they appear to the eye and inside the body.  The connective tissues between art forms and language insinuate her understanding of literacy, the world, and ourselves.