Al Quoz
Dubai
Alserkal Arts Foundation announces the recipients of its new one-time completion grant awarded to artist duo Lobna Sana and Ariel Caine.
The selection committee for this grant, which included artists Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Mona Ayyash, recognised the urgency of a project that focuses attention to Palestinian Bedouin history—one that is progressively obscured and largely absent from dominant historical narratives. Bringing together archival research, oral testimonies, and spatial reconstruction, the work seeks to make visible what has been erased and return these histories to public and community consciousness. It actively challenges political amnesia and considers how artistic practice can recover—and sustain—collective memory.
Titled Darb Al-Zol, the project is an experimental documentary film by Sana and Caine, exploring the past and ongoing erasure of Palestinian Bedouin life in the Naqab region. Initiated in 2021, the research investigates Tell El-Milh—a historically vital site now transformed into a restricted military zone of the Air Base Nevatim—by combining forensic analysis, oral testimonies, colonial British Mandate, Israeli, and private Bedouin archives. To visualise this landscape deeply altered by displacement and dispossession, and out of reach due to the military base, the filmmakers pair historical investigation, GIS, interviews, fieldwork, and 3D reconstructions. The narrative unfolds through distinct conversations of interconnected perspectives: Sana’s combination of poetic personal reflections and on-ground planning and architectural activism, with Caine’s spatial and visual investigative research, and archival colonial accounts. Together, these elements work to carefully voice the past traces and ongoing Palestinian Bedouin presence in the Naqab.
Lobna Sana is a Bedouin architect, artist, and researcher from Laqya in the Naqab, southern Palestine. She holds a BA in Architecture from Bezalel Academy and an MFA from the Royal College of Art in London. Her practice explores architecture in marginalised rural communities, drawing on Bedouin building knowledge, local materials, and communal construction methods. Her work extends into film, textiles and sound, reflecting on the landscapes of the Naqab through non-material forms of expression.
Ariel Caine is a London-based, Jerusalem-born artist and researcher working with 3D photography, modelling, and surveying technologies. His practice examines how these methods serve state surveillance and territorial control, and how they can be repurposed for activist investigation, counter-mapping, and resistance in areas of conflict. Between 2016-2021 Ariel was a Project coordinator at Forensic Architecture. He is a lecturer at UCL’s Department of Culture, Communication & Media and co-founded CHEMIST Gallery, London.
Since 2019, Alserkal Arts Foundation has supported independent artists, writers, researchers and collectives in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, focusing on projects in South Asia, West Asia, and Africa. Awarded for a one-year period, Untitled supports experimental projects that challenge conventional modes of practice and representation. The cycle will culminate in the Foundation hosting a public presentation of the completed project in Dubai.
Alserkal Arts Foundation is supported by Abdelmonem Bin Eisa Alserkal, Ahmad Bin Eisa Alserkal and the Alserkal family. The Foundation is a hub for Alserkal’s not-for-profit activities, bringing together and building on our cultural programming and partnerships.
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