Hamzeh Zahran











Photography
   - In Search of  Thule
    - Remains
    - Be my lil Baby!
    - 10 Years  After the War

Studio
   - Sculpture
   - i know
    - East/West
   - Entangled
   - Offering
   - The Toys we Carry
   - One Stroll

Writing
   -Inhertince
   -Research

Info



Home: A Glossary for a Communal















Written for Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial 2026 

 Inheritance We usually think of inheritance as something passed down through generations: a house, a family name, photographs, objects, traditions. But inheritance can also be intangible. We inherit language, gestures, recipes, stories, ways of seeing, and our tie to places we’ve never actually set foot in. 

Beyond the transfer of physical objects, inheritance is the direct transmission of a relationship. A grandmother’s stories about a city can pass down its streets, its light, and its smell long before a grandchild ever sets foot in it. What is handed down is not an address, but a sensory bond that travels further than the person who first held it. 

What complicates this transmission is that the place itself is never static. Cities change. Buildings disappear, streets are renamed, communities disperse. The Lebanese writer Etel Adnan captured this compounded distance on her own return to Beirut after years away: "It is seventeen years later. My absence has been an exile from an exile."1 The inherited memory of a place and the place as it currently exists can drift so far apart that returning does not resolve the exile at all; it only reveals a second one. Inheritance is not a frozen relic of the past. Every generation alters what it receives before passing it forward. A story is retold with different emphasis. A recipe is adjusted to what is available. A language is spoken with an accent shaped by another country. Inheritance survives by being changed. 

Here, carrying the past becomes a responsibility. To inherit is not simply to hold something passively; it means deciding what to preserve, reinterpret, and pass forward. A photograph can be kept in a drawer or printed and hung on a wall. A dialect can be left unspoken or taught to a child. These choices carry weight because they shape how the past is carried into the present. 

Inheritance also lives in shared traditions and lived history: not fixed archives but practices kept alive through repetition, care, and sometimes rejection. A family that stops telling a certain story is also making a choice about inheritance, even if it looks like accidental loss. Holding something back still passes a message down, shaping the next generation just as much as what we hand over. 

Inheritance, then, is rarely a single object passed intact from one hand to another. It is closer to a relationship: partial, altered, sometimes contested, carried by people who were not necessarily present for its origin. What remains is not the past itself, but what someone decided was worth carrying forward, and what, despite the distance of time or geography, refused to be left behind. 

1Etel Adnan, In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2005), p. 1.