DAAR

DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency) is an art and architecture collective and a residency program based in Beit Sahour, Palestine. The group’s core members are Sandi Hilal, Alessandro Petti, and Eyal Weizman. DAAR’s work combines discourse, spatial intervention, education, collective learning, public meetings, and legal challenges. DAAR’s practice is centred on one of the most difficult dilemmas of political practice: how to act both propositionally and critically within an environment in which the political force field is so dramatically distorted. It proposes the subversion, reuse, profanation, and recycling of the existing infrastructure of a colonial occupation. DAAR projects have been shown in various biennales and museums, among them Venice Biennale, the Bozar in Brussels, NGBK in Berlin, the Istanbul Biennial, The Architecture Biennale Rotterdam, Home Works in Beirut, Architekturforum Tirol in Innsbruk, the Tate in London, the Oslo Triennial, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and many other places. DAAR’s members have taught lectured and published internationally. In 2010 DAAR was awarded the Prince Claus Prize for Architecture, received the Art initiative Grant, and was shortlisted for the Chernikov Prize. DAAR’s projects are documented in the book Architecture after Revolution (Sternberg Press, 2013).

As of March 2014