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Saba Innab
Inscribed on Sight | 2019
Concrete decorative blocks and Metal Structure. 375 cm x 165 cm x 78 cm (Combined). The work Inscribed on Sight is based on an image of a Gazan tunnel being partially exposed. Seeing the tunnel strips it of its essence of being unseen; that is, the act of seeing becomes an act of destroying. Only the exposed parts of the tunnel are modeled here as fragments of a body that has rather been ‘excavated,’ like an archaeological artifact, its value being linked to a national identity and image. In isolation, the fragments become a reference to an architectural gesture, to authority. The found fragment reconstructed here is built with a decorative element used regionally in modernist buildings called claustra. The use of it here is a superimposition of movement and dwelling – and the impossibility of the two in this context – revealing the entanglement of material references and politics. In Saba Innab’s attempts to analyze the fragility of refuge, exile, and the extraterritorial space, the tunnel becomes an archetype of dwelling in the temporary.

Reference SI-ISO-2019-A

Biography of the artist

Born in Kuwait. 1980
Works and Lives in Between Amman and Beirut.


Architect, urban researcher, and artist practicing out of Amman and Beirut. She holds a Bachelor of Architecture Engineering from the Jordan University of Science and Technology (2004). Innab has worked as an architect and urban planner with UNRWA on the reconstruction of Nahr el Bared Palestinian refugee Camp in the North of Lebanon, a project nominated for the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2013. In 2014, she has received the visiting research fellowship initiated by Studio X Amman (Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation). Her work was exhibited most recently in the 57th edition of Carnegie International- Pittsburgh, USA (2018-2019), Relics of Now- Milano Arch Week, Triennale di Milano (2018), Biennale d’Architecture d’Orléans, Frac Centre-Val de Loire- Orléans, France (2017), Misunderstandings, Campo- Rome (2016), Marrakech Biennial 6 (2016), Home Works7 (2015), Lest the Two Seas Meet, Museum of Modern Art- Warsaw (2015) and HIWAR/Conversations in Amman, Darat al Funun- Amman (2013). Her solo shows include Al Rahhalah (The Traveler) in Marfa’- Beirut (2016), No- Sheep’s Land in Darat al Funun- Amman (2011) and Agial Gallery- Beirut (2011). She has participated in Home Workspace Program (HWP) 2011-2012. Through drawing, mapping, model making and design, her work explores the suspended states between temporality and permanence, and is concerned with variable notions of dwelling and building and their political, spatial and poetic implications in language and architecture.

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