Artist Statement

Inass Yassin is a studio artist and exhibitions curator; former director of Birzeit University Museum. Employing object and image making, time and research based intervention, Yassin works in a variety of mediums including sculpture, video, installation and painting. Her social engaging practice  examines the social shifts that have occurred within the Palestinian culture since the late 1980s. By tracing incidents in the transforming city scape and witnessing the conversion in the social life in Palestine, the work evolves to reveal the politics and aesthetics of transformation, on the private and collective scale.  In her collaborative projects, she invites community to contemplate the forces that dramatically shifted the social realities. Examples are: Projection (2008-2010), on Al-Waleed Cinema house in Ramallah-Al Bireh, Studio Cairo (2011-2012) in the city of Nablus,  the gardening initiative: Romantic Boycott, 2013-2017 in Birzeit University, and an outdoor neon sculpture: God Bless (2017), in The Palestinian Museum garden.  

In her painting projects, such as in The Sea is Black (2007) and Transformation (2008), she used image-making to create a visual experience of the Palestinians' traumatic associations with immobility and inaccessibility to their own land. In Sparkling City (2015), she investigated a similar urban change in Beirut. 

In her most recent painting project, Bride and Groom (2019-2020), she is working in the tradition of oil painting portraits as a visual and active medium to investigate the shift in the social dynamics. The medium is a platform through which, the artist examines the political constraints in social and art history alike. 

As curator of Birzeit University Museum, she designed and implemented the program between 2010 and 2017, and curated Political Posters in Private Collections 2013 and co-curated Framed-Unframed 2011. Her most current curated exhibition is on display at The Palestinian Museum until September 2022. 

Inass Yassin has shown her work in Palestine and abroad: in New York, Portland ME,  Leipzig, Oslo, Eindhoven, and Dubai, in addition to residencies in Braziers, the United Kingdom; Makan, Jordan and Cittadella Arte in Italy. Her work is within public and private local and international collections. Yassin has earned grants or scholarships from the Fulbright Student Program, the Arab Fund for Art and Culture AFAC, the Ford Foundation, and the Hani Qaddoumi Foundation.