Distorted Geography

Mixed Media: ceramics and cowhide, 2025

A torn and punctured strip of skinned brown hide confronts a pink ceramic sculpture emerging from the ground: glossy, saturated, and strange. The red cowhide, suspended from the ceiling, stands as a symbol of memory and fragmentation. The sculpture, on the other hand, is an unfamiliar outgrowth of this fragmentation, a bodily swelling that does not belong to the land, yet springs from it.

Between what hangs from above and what rises from below, an inner scene is formed: a shattered body and a land fabricated as sacred truth. This piece is a contemplation of impossible wholeness, imitation, and the body as a fragile archive of myths that have never been fully told.

The title was inspired by Internal Perspective, a work from Maroun Tomb’s exhibition, which served as a starting point for this piece. This reference opens up a space to think of the “interior” not as a sealed-off container, but as fertile ground for rupture and emergence. Badran’s perspective is not of a particular space, but rather, three distinct elements that form an interior reading of a geography that refuses stability. It is shaped instead by doubt, absence, and the remnants of a presumed sanctity. In this way, internal perspective becomes both a material and conceptual practice– one that attempts to touch what cannot be directly represented.

Doaa Badran is a visual artist from the village of Kabul in Palestine. She is co-founder of Shahinat Burtuqal, an independent digital platform specializing in contemporary visual arts, and manager of Halqa Art Studio in Kabul. She holds a Masters in Visual Arts from the University of Haifa and a degree in jewelry design from the WIZO Haifa Academy of Design and Education. Badran’s roles also include lecturing at the university level, activism in the Palestinian sphere and hosting an artist podcast at the Paley Center in Jerusalem. She has participated in exhibitions on a local and international level.