Born in Amman in 1983, Dina Haddadin is an architect and visual artist. Her interests combine various techniques, from the traditional to the experimental, creating multi-layered works that examine research-based issues on the ‘Right to the City’ in a landscape of transient urbanization, changing geographies and imagined places that we live in.

Haddadin has over 12 years of architectural, design engineering and art experience and holds a B.A. in Architecture from the Jordan University of Science and Technology. She continued her studies in fine arts at the School of Visual Arts-SVA New York. She is an Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC) grantee for her art installation project “Island 861-How to Disappear” in 2015. Haddadin has been designing site-specific installations for the last three years, namely, the Jordanian Pavilion at Dubai Design Week 2015; the “Craft District” installations at Amman Design Week 2016; and “The Stream” at Amman Design Week 2017. She was one of two curators and the lead designer of Amman Design Week 2016 and 2017 and is currently a member of the design committee for the Jordanian Pavilion at Dubai Expo 2020.

DISPLACED

"In a city that is exposed to a continuum of development and re-development, the subject of displacement renders its spaces its margins; people in constant flux under an imposed system of order, of regularity, of certainty and of uniformity, where intangible boundaries and margins are also in constant mutation and formation.

The stone quarries in this body of work are a metaphor for the concept of displacement. The system that is imposed; the grid that is a symbol of modernity dressed onto the mountain, cutting it into fragments like Lego pieces, systematically ordered, and patiently waiting in line for their assembly.

This is what we are left with, then, a negative space that by itself is a geometric ensemble of grids, layers and fragments. A symbol of a fabricated reality that artificially structures and holds its own determination and potentiality. A symbol of the alien inserted into the familiar landscape—flattened, geometricized, ordered, anti-natural, anti-mimetic, anti-real."

Dina Haddadin