Dena Al-Adeeb

Works · 2006 – ongoing

A practice that holds the analytical
and the intimate in one frame.

Performance, video, installation, sound, and letter-writing — mapping collective memory, refugee narratives, and the architecture of war. Most works are collaborative and community-engaged; many move between the gallery, the page, and the street.

Sunlight crossing the patinated copper tiles of a vast roof — from An Archive of Future Memories
01 — Featured

An Archive of Future Memories

A Letter to My Daughter

A multimedia project about a mother and daughter charting a trilogy of familial forced displacements — bearing witness to the textures of war-based displacement, and to memory as presence and mothering at the end of the world.

2021 – ongoing · Video · performance · installation · sound art · book

View project →
  1. 02
    A lone figure at the luminous edge of the sea — a still from At the Edge of the Sea

    At the Edge of the Sea على حافة البحر

    An electro-acoustic expanded-cinema performance that takes the Epic of Gilgamesh as a departure point — excavating the relationship between racialized necropolitical destruction and bodies in protest across time.

    2022 · Live two-channel video + sound performance · with Sholeh Asgary

  2. 03
    A hand holds wild red poppies and chamomile against a sunlit Palestinian hillside — Love Letters to Palestine

    Love Letters to Palestine

    Decolonial Love and Feminist Praxis

    Drawing on the love letter as an ethnographic, aesthetic, and political modality, a call-and-response archive that practices love as a decolonial method — land, loss, longing, home, and return.

    2021 · Video · photography · letter writing · with the Palestinian Feminist Collective

  3. 04
    A glowing red suspended form fills a domed performance space, with the audience seated below — Crossings / عبور

    Crossings عبور

    An ongoing collaboration with sound artist Sholeh Asgary that departs from the Epic of Gilgamesh to excavate racialized necropolitical destruction, forced displacement, and bodies in protest.

    2019 – ongoing · Electro-acoustic expanded cinema · sound · moving image · vocal traditions · sonic installation · with Sholeh Asgary

  4. 05
    A miniature tabletop tableau staging a scene of judgment and witness — A People’s Tribunal

    A People’s Tribunal

    A miniature tableau that takes up the form of the people’s tribunal as a site of witness, testimony, and judgment — the apparatus of accountability itself made the subject.

    2019 · Tableau · miniature installation

  5. 06
    A blue-toned composite of mannequins behind printed newspaper — This Stays Between Us

    This Stays Between Us

    A Fantastical, Dialogical Archive

    A quasi-fictive archive built by two artists in dialogue — walking, exchanging images and memory to map the psychogeography of Cairo and an alternative archive of the 2011 Egyptian revolution.

    2016 & 2018 · Walking as an art practice · digital and archival art · with Nada Shalaby

  6. 07
    A long communal table of diasporic Iraqis sharing a meal in a darkened room — The Taste of Displacement

    The Taste of Displacement

    A feminist intervention staging dinner performances with diasporic Iraqis — exploring radical hospitality, the intimacy of “doing-cooking,” and food as a contested marker of cultural memory.

    2014 · Two-channel video and live art project

  7. 08
    A pale, ghostly figure stands in the doorway of a ruined structure deep in bare winter woods — Disturbance

    Disturbance

    1990 / 1980 / 2003

    A visual and performative memoir as a triptych — 1990, 1980, 2003 — the years of the wars that scored the artist’s own displacements, charting memory as presence against the absurdity of infinite war.

    2013 · Performance and triptych video

  8. 09
    A lone robed figure stands in a vast field of snow, dwarfed by white emptiness — Baghdadi Mem/Wars, Absence/Presence

    Baghdadi Mem/Wars

    A video and photography series in three suites — Still/Chaos, Efface/Remain, Absence/Presence — on displacement and the embodied experiences of women living in war times.

    2010 · Video and photography · triptych · with Sama Alshaibi

  9. 10
    An elaborate devotional installation glowing with green, gold, and red light, built by community members for Ashura — Sacred Spaces

    Sacred Spaces

    (Re)creating Ashura

    Al-Adeeb’s earliest project — transposing the communal ritual environments of Ashura, and the community’s hand-built reconstructions of Karbala, into installation art.

    2006 · Installation · photography · community-engaged work