Mirna Bamieh

Mirna Bamieh (born 1983, Jerusalem, Palestine) is a Palestinian artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores the politics of disappearance and the production of memory, with particular attention to loss, continuity and erasure within Palestinian communities. Working across performance, installation, video, text, sound, ceramics and food, Bamieh examines how cultural knowledge is transmitted, transformed and sometimes threatened with disappearance. Her practice brings together artistic research, storytelling and culinary traditions, using food not simply as a subject but as a means of creating encounters and investigating relationships between people, place, history and politics. In 2018, Bamieh founded Palestine Hosting Society, an ongoing live-art project centred on Palestinian food practices and the transmission of recipes across generations. Through dinner performances and participatory interventions, the project investigates culinary traditions that are at risk of disappearing, bringing together research, cooking, storytelling and collective experience. Her engagement with food developed alongside formal culinary training, following her earlier work in video and installation, and has become a central part of her socially engaged practice. Palestine Hosting Society functions as a platform for researching, sharing and reactivating Palestinian culinary knowledge while considering the historical and political conditions that have contributed to its loss. Since 2019, Bamieh has increasingly explored fermentation as both a material process and a way of thinking about personal and collective histories. Her ongoing *Sour Things* series brings together text, sound, ceramics, drawing and video within site-specific installations and interactive environments. Fermentation becomes a framework through which she considers transformation, preservation, decay and the passage of time, shifting from the collective setting of the dinner table towards more intimate forms of reflection. Recent iterations of the project include *Sour Things: The Souq*, presented at Sharjah Biennial 15 in 2023, and subsequent installations developed through her continuing research into fermentation and preservation. Bamieh has presented her work internationally at institutions and festivals including Sharjah Biennial, Tate Modern, Kunsthaus Zürich, Fondazione Merz, Aichi Triennale, MoMA PS1, Tanzquartier Wien and TBA21. Her earlier work has also been presented through Qalandiya International, the Marrakech Biennale, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, the International Film Festival Rotterdam and the Beirut Art Center, among other venues. Her practice has been supported by a number of international residencies, including The Invisible Dog Art Center in New York, Binz 39 in Zurich, the Windler Foundation in Stein am Rhein, Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, Tokyo Wonder Site and Delfina Foundation in London. Bamieh received a BA in Psychology from Birzeit University in Ramallah in 2006 and an MFA in Fine Arts from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem in 2013. She also participated in the Ashkal Alwan Home Workspace Program in Beirut and subsequently pursued professional culinary training, receiving a diploma in professional cooking in 2017. Her work has received support from the A. M. Qattan Foundation, including its Young Artist of the Year Award in 2012, as well as the CEC ArtsLink International Fellowship and the Dr. Georg and Josi Guggenheim Foundation Award in 2022. In 2023 she participated in the Elizabeth Krief and Jacques Manardo Artist Residency Program at The Invisible Dog in New York.