Through the Eye of a Needle

Through the Eye of a Needle  / من ثقب إبرة (Min thuqbi ʾibrah)

Shereen Abdul Karim Hassanein

2022, Palestine, 4’53min

A personal project with a communal impact, this film aims at transforming individual memories of suffering into a collective memory. It portrays both satirical and realistic scenes from public spaces in Gaza City. The project addresses a range of social issues that have persisted and recurred over the past 15 years, becoming an inseparable part of the city’s fabric and the lives of its residents. It also explores the conceptual landscape of Gaza through the digitization and 3D modeling of these spaces – structures that continue to expand as the blockade endures. This is an attempt to envision how the current natural space might appear.

Language: Arabic (on-screen texts)

Recommended for children under 14 years old: Yes

Technique: 3D CGI

Stills:

About Shereen Abdul Kareem Hassanein

Shereen Abdul Kareem Hassanein (b. 1996, Gaza City) is a Palestinian architect and visual artist whose interdisciplinary practice investigates the relationship between urban space, memory, and visual storytelling. With a Bachelor’s degree in Architecture from the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG), and a professional role at V-Verse, a company specialized in building immersive digital environments, Shereen bridges architectural thinking with contemporary art to explore how spaces shape, hold, and transmit collective experience. Her work draws on architectural language to reflect on the layers of memory embedded in the city, focusing on how places, especially Gaza, transform over time through social, cultural, and historical processes. Using drawing, collage, sculpture, installation, and spatial modeling, she constructs visual archives that document, reinterpret, and preserve the identity of urban environments, often blurring the line between real and imagined geographies. Central to her practice is a long-term interest in archiving urban memory, not as static preservation but as an active process of narration and engagement. Her projects build a dialogue between personal stories and the spatial character of the city, where architecture becomes a tool to decode history, reconstruct presence, and speculate on future forms.

Shereen views the city as a living entity – fluid, layered, and charged with symbolic meaning. Her works often emerge from research-based processes and are informed by the materiality of place, vernacular forms, and the invisible forces that shape urban life. Gaza remains a central axis in her work – not only as a site of origin but as a conceptual and emotional framework for investigating broader questions of visibility, erasure, continuity, and transformation.

Her projects have been exhibited locally and internationally, including:

Qurban / Contemporary Links, Shababik, Gaza, 2019

Solo Exhibition, Artist Residency / Shababik, Gaza, 2020

Through the Eye of a Needle, ICRC, Gaza, 2022

Tadafuq (Flow), Madrid and Gaza, 2023

Artistic Residency, Spanish Academy in Rome, 2023

From You / For You, Group Exhibition, Norway, 2025

I Will Write My Family’s Will Above the Clouds, Berlin, London, Oslo, Santander, 2024

Her practice offers a thoughtful lens on how memory is spatialized, archived, and reimagined – positioning art and architecture as tools for inquiry, preservation, and poetic reconstruction.