Susanne Khalil Yusef
I want to be able to tell my story in complete freedom.
Susanne Khalil Yusef’s (1984, Germany) Palestinian background and the profound events she and her loved ones have experienced are a common thread in her work. Her multifaceted body of work includes murals, paintings, textiles, ceramics, video, performances, sculptures and self-created archives. At first glance, Yusef’s brightly colored work seems lighthearted and playful but if you look closer, it refers to distress and dangerous situations.
During her training, Yusef researched her family history and the Palestinian diaspora. In 2014, she studied for a semester at the International Academy of Art Palestine in Ramallah (PS) as part of this research. She started collecting stories that have a relationship to her Palestinian roots. This helped her to develop her own visual language. In her work, Khalil Yusef raises critical questions about themes such as homeland and displacement, identity and socio-geographic power relations.
