Mahdi Baraghithi (b. 1991, Ramallah, Palestine) is a visual artist who works across a range of media including performance, installation, and collage. Baraghithi explores and deconstructs the representation of masculinity and the male body in Arab societies, specifically in his own context of Palestine through his use of materials, such as found images and readymade objects.
He received an MFA from ENSA Bourges, France in 2018, and a BA in Contemporary Visual Art from the International Academy of Art Palestine in 2015. He has participated in many workshops and residences including the year-long Home Workspace Program at Ashkal Alwan – The Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts (2015-16). He also holds a diploma from the Palestine Film Institute in Ramallah (2010). He has exhibited his work in several group exhibitions including Cities Future (2013), Naples, Italy; Cities Exhibition 6 / Lydda – A Garden Disremembered (2018), Birzeit University Museum, Palestine. His recent work delves into the notions of the body, home, and the mundane through the manipulation of found images and texts. The exhibited works were produced in Palestine, France, and Lebanon, and range from performance to installation to collage, with a focus on ongoing themes of engaging and deconstructing images of the Arab man found in popular, national, and religious culture. He also explores the positioning and gendering of the male body through the different frameworks of social and political stereotypes inscribed onto the body, which contour definitions of manhood and acceptable forms of masculinity in society.
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