Hiba G. Isleem

Hiba G. Isleem is a Palestinian artist, architect, and researcher working across experimental animation, video, and installation. Her practice moves between archival and material approaches, exploring memory, displacement, and the moment when matter begins to act.

During her fellowship at Akademie Schloss Solitude (2025–2026), Isleem developed and presented a series of works that expand her practice into interactive and spatial forms. Her installation Numbers and Squares was presented at Open Solitude Summer 2025, transforming family VHS and Hi8 footage from the 1980s and 1990s into a playable environment where memory is navigated through touch, choice, and interruption.

Her project Inside the Box was presented at Open Solitude Winter 2025, unfolding as an immersive environment that reconstructs space through sound, moving image, and archival fragments, treating memory as something experienced rather than told.

Her exhibition Restless will be presented towards the end of her residency at Akademie Schloss Solitude, extending her practice into a material exploration of movement and repetition. Bringing together earlier video works, the exhibition focuses on the moment when matter begins to take presence, where machines, electrical fragments, tree roots, and repetitive gestures shift from passive objects into active forms. Here, matter is not fixed or inert, but moves, repeats, and insists, blurring the boundary between object and living form.

Rooted in her background in architecture, Isleem approaches storytelling as a spatial condition. Across her works, images, sounds, and objects are arranged as environments to be entered, activated, and continuously reconfigured.