Born in Berlin in 1962, Susan Hefuna grew up in Egypt, Germany, and Austria. In 1992, she completed a postgraduate degree in multimedia at the Institut für Neue Medien, Städelschule, Frankfurt, where she studied under artist, curator, and theoretician Peter Weibel.
In drawings, installations, performances, photographs, sculptures, and videos, Hefuna draws on her mixed heritage to ponder the intersection of location and identity. She aims at a spiritual, open-ended, and timeless art that also illuminates current sociopolitical issues.
In drawings, installations, performances, photographs, sculptures, and videos, Hefuna draws on her mixed heritage to ponder the intersection of location and identity. She aims at a spiritual, open-ended, and timeless art that also illuminates current sociopolitical issues.
Hefuna’s works often incorporate the form or image of the characteristically Mashrabiya, a carved wood or stone architectural latticework screen, which she uses to investigate aesthetic tradition, national custom, and the exchanged gaze.
Hefuna regards drawing as a cornerstone of her practice and in an ongoing body of work on tracing paper that includes her Buildings and Cityscapes series, presents abstracted images inspired by microscopic molecular and biological—as well as larger architectural—forms. The drawings’ delicate ink lines constitute a reflection on structure in every sense of the word. Hefuna has characterized her drawings in general as being especially related to her life and travels, but declines to identify them with particular events or locations. “A drawing has no nationality,” she told Flash Art magazine in 2010, “and has no time and space. It is its own universe.”