FAQ
What is Sahab?
Sahab is an artistic initiative developed by the Hawaf collective. Since 2021, it brings together artists, researchers and cultural practitioners to support contemporary Palestinian creation while imagining new ways of preserving and sharing cultural memory. Born from the idea of the Sahab Imaginary Museum, the project explores how art, imagination and digital tools can help build cultural infrastructures beyond borders and isolation. Rather than functioning as a traditional institution, Sahab operates as a distributed platform combining creative production, research programs, workshops and grants.
Through its different activities, Sahab supports artists in producing new work, facilitates exchanges, and develops digital spaces where artworks, archives and ideas can circulate internationally. At the heart of the project lies a shared ambition: to sustain artistic life and collective imagination despite conditions of fragmentation and displacement.
Who is Hawaf?
Hawaf is a collective founded in 2021 by artists, architects and researchers based between Gaza, Europe and the SWANA region. The name “Hawaf”, meaning “edges” in Arabic, reflects the collective’s position at the margins of traditional cultural institutions and its desire to imagine new forms of cultural structures. The collective was formed around a shared question: how can art and imagination contribute to rebuilding cultural life in contexts marked by isolation, displacement and destruction?
From this reflection emerged the concept of the Sahab Imaginary Museum. Rather than a physical building, Sahab is imagined as a museum in the cloud, a virtual and collective institution where artworks, archives and stories can be preserved, shared and reimagined.
For Hawaf, imagination is not an escape from reality but a tool for confronting it. Through artistic production, research and collaborative initiatives, the collective seeks to preserve memory, support contemporary creation and imagine cultural futures beyond imposed limitations.
