February 11 – 14
Location: Art Lofts Gallery, 111 N Frances St, Madison, WI
Closing Reception: Thursday, February 12, 6-8pm
Tanya Habjouqa is a socially engaged artist and visual researcher who examines how communities experience political violence and how those experiences move through land, testimony, and visual culture. Her interdisciplinary practice is grounded in long-term reporting, collaborative methodologies, and material experimentation. She holds an MA in Global Media from SOAS–University of London and is currently pursuing an MFA at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where her studio practice translates field research from Palestine into a language of archives, sound, plants, and sculptural form.
For more than a decade, Habjouqa has photographed how political violence shapes daily life across the Occupied West Bank. Her work documents communities facing state-sanctioned settler attacks, forced displacement, burning and uprooting of olive orchards, seizure of springs, razed houses and farmlands, and the steady unmaking of daily life through closures, outposts, and military restrictions. Her research follows these linked forms of environmental and human assault, showing how ecological collapse, whether engineered or exploited, functions as an extension of occupation.
Inside the studio, Habjouqa translates these field investigations into tactile forms. She creates screenprints from early twentieth-century Palestinian archives, constructs sculptural platforms from carpets salvaged from demolition sites, and cultivates olive seedlings and prickly cacti as living elements of installation. Working with the Madison Greenhouse and glassmaker Matthew Everett, she cultivates rescued Palestinian seeds and develops custom vessels that integrate these living elements into installation. Her experimental films links lullabies recorded from families of incarcerated Palestinians with the testimonies surrounding their separation.
Her practice exists where testimony, image, and material collide, and where photography becomes both evidence and metaphor. Political violence and ecological collapse anchor the narrative. Her perspective is shaped by an inheritance of displacement as a Jordanian of Circassian descent, a lineage that informs her interest in 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!