Missing Face

Qattan Foundation – Visual Arts Studio Residency, 2025

During her residency at the Visual Arts Studio of the Al-Qattan Foundation, Tala Asmar developed Journey to the Missing Faces, a project that explores printmaking as both a visual and emotional medium, and as a way of thinking through memory, presence, and absence.

The project begins with questions around what experiences leave behind on the body and within memory, and what the process of printing can reveal about personal and collective traces. Asmar approaches printmaking as a reflection of what has been imprinted on Palestinian bodies and their memories, carrying traces of both the past and the present. Through this process, she asks: How do figures become revealed through the act of printing? And how can an image evoke the presence of faces and features searching for visibility within absence?

Asmar works through experimentation with materials and transparency, using transparent nylon and other materials in processes of hand printing. She combines contemporary and archival photographs, digitally manipulating them before manually transferring them onto the material, transforming the images into overlapping layers where memory and material intersect.

Materiality plays a central role in the work, as transparency allows the image to shift, disappear, and re-emerge depending on the viewer’s position and movement. Through these layers, the image is not presented as a fixed presence, but as something unstable and temporary, taking shape between what is revealed and what remains concealed.

Tala Asmar is a visual artist and Teaching Assistant at Birzeit University. Her practice is grounded in experimentation with hand-printing processes and diverse materials, particularly transparent surfaces, through which she reconsiders the concept of printing and its relationship to image, memory, and the body.