ARTIST BIO
Mar Sub Laban is a multidisciplinary artist from Miami, Florida whose work takes form in video art, installation, textile art, and poetry. Much of Sub Laban’s work is rooted in the Palestinian-American experience and weaves studies of traditional folkloric art practices, such as Tatreez (embroidery), and explorations of contemporary digital media to create interactive installations that build on legacies of diasporic storytelling by blending past and contemporary implements. They attended New World School of the Arts and earned a BFA with emphasis on Art and Technology. Sub Laban has exhibited their work at the Young Arts gallery in Downtown Miami, Museum of Arts and Sciences (MOAS) in Daytona Beach, New World Gallery, 786 Gallery, Locust Projects in Miami and RAW POPUP in Downtown Miami.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Mar Sub Laban is a multidisciplinary artist from Miami, Florida whose work takes form in video art, installation, textile art, and poetry. Much of Sub Laban’s work is rooted in the Palestinian-American experience. Studies of traditional folkloric art practices, such as Tatreez (embroidery), and explorations of contemporary digital media are interwoven to create interactive installations that build on legacies of diasporic storytelling by blending past and contemporary implements. The multimedia installations stand as living archives of not only the artist’s individual memory and experience as a Palestinian-Puerto Rican-American, but also as sites of social practice as the artist carries forward the legacy of traditional mediums, a poetic mending of past and future. Narratives of familial relationships, displacement, and cultural abstraction are threads which move through the artist’s exploration of mediums.
In recent work, abstraction through color in particular has become a tool through which emotion is explored. During the intensity of adolescence, the artist developed strong associations with these colors, often finding themselves surrounded by red in distressing moments and blue in affirming ones. Since then, this binary has become a device allowing for storytelling between and amongst digital and analog implements in installations and other explorations. Through working with abstraction, the artist extracts and meditates on emotions from the complex narratives of family, culture, exile, etc. attempting to distill them through form, shape, and poetry.
As an educator, Sub Laban’s work functions also as social practice through public engagement. Most of their work involves facilitating youth programs with community centers (Overtown Youth Center, Miami Dade Public Library System) to host workshops drawing from their practice and inspired by traditional Palestinian art forms. This work is necessary to maintain these practices in circulation, especially amidst direct and vitriolic threats to their survival.