In 1947, the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine divided, among other things, the Dead Sea. The east side fell in Jordan, the southwest side in Israel, and the northwest side in Palestine. The Dead Sea In Three Parts looks at the formal consequences of this political act by taking the volume of the body of water and cutting it along these demarcation lines. The result is a precariously balanced topographical sculpture where the Jordanian side remains upright – as the deepest point of the Dead Sea lies there – while the two other sides are sheared away and collapse to the floor.
Rayyane Tabet’s work explores the relationship between history and the built environment through sculptures that reconstitute the perception of physical and temporal distance. He is the recipient of the Emerging Artist Award of the Sharjah Biennial (2011), the Jury Prize of the Future Generation Art Prize (2012), and the Abraaj Group Art Prize (2013). In 2016, he was selected as a DAAD artist-in-residence in Berlin.
