Blqees Zuhair (Libya) is a curator, organiser, and architect based in Zuwara, Libya. Her work brings together architectural methods with photography and exhibition-making to investigate how space and sociality is made political in Libya. She connects the continuity between historical archives and field research with contemporary cultural practices and their concrete outcomes in collaborative contexts.
During her residency at Delfina Foundation, Blqees intends to further develop, The Shore is the Land, a project that began in 2019 which seeks to consider migration histories and seafaring from the perspective situated within the Libyan coast. Building on the context of Zuwara, a seaside town 120km from the capital Tripoli, and home to an Amazigh community, the project considers how indigeneity and movement are co-constitutive and made visible through social ritual, architectural formations, and local imaginaries. The city today is one of the main departure points for migration to Europe from Libya and by thinking through this contemporary reality she seeks to expose the multiple ways in which mobility is imagined and practiced. This example becomes a mechanism to be able to consider how maritime space is modulated by movement and what are the ways in which curatorial and documentary practices can engage and contribute to such context. In London, Blqees will explore the city’s maritime history, looking at naval archives of Libya, oral history, and related examples and engaging with local histories and community cultural groups who are invested in the relation between migration, space-making, spatial memory, and social activism.
Blqees has worked in professional architectural practice and pursued independent research projects for the past five years. As part of Waraq, an art organisation based in Tripoli, she co-curated an exhibition project Shifting Sands (2021), which involved a production programme that commissioned new works from emerging Libyan artists, architects, and researchers, and Kashkoul of collective resistance (2020), a project that sought to contend with the pandemic in a context of ongoing violence. In collaboration with Locale, an artist-run collective in Khartoum, she co-curated Until We Meet, (2021-ongoing), a project to examine the historical, emotional, intimate, public, and collective spaces of Libyan and Sudanese communities.
Blqees is undertaking hybrid residency, commencing remotely ahead of her arrival in London.
WITH SUPPORT FROM
Delfina Foundation’s Network of Middle East, North Africa and South Asia Patrons
RESIDENCY SEASON
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Please note all resident biographies are accurate at the time of their residency.