Susanne Khalil Yusef

NL/PS, 1984

resident
- 2022 – 2024

Susanne Khalil Yusef makes immersive colourful installations by combining a wide range of media such as ceramics, textiles, and sculpture. At first glance, Yusef’s brightly coloured work seems light-hearted and playful, but if you look closer it refers to distress and dangerous situations. She raises critical questions about themes such as homeland and displacement, identity and socio-geographic power relations. The stories in her work are closely related to her own biography, such as the conflicts in her home country, Palestine.

Yusef’s work has been included in the collections of the Museum Arnhem, the Dutch Textile Museum in Tilburg, and the Province of Gelderland.

Over the past months I have been experimenting with sculpting portraits in virtual reality and making small 3D prints of them. Also I have machine-cut one of them into olivewood and another casted in bronze. To give colour I have made use of the spray-paint workshop here, to apply car paints on them. One of these portraits is currently part of the outdoor exhibition ‘Beelden in Leiden’.

Next to this, I made a large ceramic work by hand; it is covered with plastic as it is not yet finished but you can have a peek. Once finished, it will be presented coming July in the garden of Museum Arnhem.

Something else I have tried for the first time is silkscreen printing. The result is an edition that consists of 12 layers that is for sale in the Rijksakademie gift shop.

Other work in the studio was made earlier and gives an impression of what I was working on before my residency. These works are made of bronze, aluminium, glass and textile.