Biography:
Palestinian designer/artist born in Nazareth, Walid Maw’ed gratuated at the Institute of Fashion and Textile, Beit Sahour. Costume designer for movies such as “Paradise now”, he was awarded an A.M.Qattan Foundation grant to participate in UNIDEE-University of Ideas in 2004. During the residence, Walid conceived his project on the water issue, “Waiting for Water”. The project, between 2004 and 2007, has been developed together with the group "watercollection-net" and presented in Biella, Ivrea, Venice Biennale, Sicily, Gemona del Fiuli, Turin, also in occasion of the 2006 Winter Olympics. He’s currently working as costume designer for a movie.

Work in the exhibition:
Waiting for water (poster, 2006)
The street is mostly invisible to us, a space of passage that both allows for and determines the movement of people, as the shape of a riverbed guides the flow of water. Placing a temporary barrier through a passage into urban space, a black sheet that blocks vision and in doing so makes the street itself newly visible as a hard enclosure. It directs attention. It creates a question mark for the public. But it also allows for choices; the flexible cloth receives, softens and spreads signals from wind, from the touch of people, from their action against its backdrop and the redirection of their movements.
It thus calls attention to our relationship to nature and to one another, and the potential conflict and responsibility such a relation necessarily involves. It also proposes an alternative kind of public space.
This project is an open and collective work, in the sense that its ultimate form is determined first by a loose-knit group, ‘watercollection- net’, second, by the response by the public, and further even by natural forces and the qualities of the material, here a metaphor for the fundamental and precious source of life, water. Our intervention is the product of a free and expanding network, and part of a series of artistic acts in public spaces that aim to draw attention to the qualities of water, its centrality in contemporary political conflict and its centrality in any solution to such issues.
Water should remain free, as our own potential freedom is reflected in its rippling surfaces.