February 11 – 14
Location: Art Lofts Gallery, 111 N Frances St, Madison, WI
Closing Reception: Thursday, February 12, 6-8pm
A socially engaged artist and visual researcher, Habjouqa examines how communities experience political violence and the ways those experiences move through land, testimony, and visual culture. Translating long-term field research from Palestine into archives, sound, plants, and sculptural form, her work extends documentary practice into installation.
She creates screenprints from early 20th-century Palestinian archives, constructs sculptural platforms from salvaged carpets, and cultivates olive seedlings and prickly cacti as living elements of installation. Plant cultivation for the exhibition was supported by the Madison Greenhouse Store. She develops custom glass vessels for these installations, with glass fabrication by Matthew Everett, with select works incorporating neon by Daniella Thach. Her experimental films link lullabies recorded from families of incarcerated Palestinians with testimonies surrounding their separation.
Habjouqa’s interdisciplinary practice is grounded in long-term reporting, collaborative methodologies, and material experimentation. It exists where testimony, image, and material collide, where photography becomes both evidence and metaphor. Political violence and ecological collapse anchor her work, shaped by an inheritance of displacement as a Jordanian of Circassian descent—a lineage that informs her investigation into how images construct visibility, erasure, and historical memory.
Beyond Palestine, Habjouqa has reported extensively on rising Islamophobia in Europe, Syrian refugee communities, racialized policing in the American South, and public health crises in Iraq, forming a broader investigation into how state power and displacement intersect across geographies.
Her work has been internationally recognized. Her monograph Occupied Pleasures received a World Press Photo award and was named one of the best photo books of the year by TIME and the Smithsonian. In 2025, she received a Portrait Prize from the National Press Photographers Association and was awarded the Aftermath Grant for her ongoing research in Palestine. A founding mentor of the Arab Documentary Photography Program, she has supported emerging practitioners across the Middle East and North Africa for more than a decade. Her editorial clients include The Wall Street Journal, NPR, Le Monde, National Geographic, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post. She is represented by East Wing Gallery.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison Art MFA Qualifier Exhibition season continues with Tanya Habjouqa’s art exhibition. The qualifier solo exhibitions are presented by the graduate students during their fourth semester as the evaluation review of their creative work to qualify for advancement in the MFA program. Come view the work and research by our newest cohort of developing artists!