Architect Sahel Al Hiyari, our curator at the Hangar exhibition, designs an outside installation as part of the exhibition, which focuses on the entrance experience into the courtyard at the venue. This installation is entitled ‘A Memorial for a Lost Courtyard I have never been to’.

This installation stands in a space that was once enclosed by a fabric of humble yet stern buildings. The edges of the space were defined and buffered from the street and the site's natural surroundings. Although the courtyard was clearly demarcated by structures, one would have still been able to see the surrounding mountains with their clusters of houses, walled-in gardens, narrow passages and stairs typical to Amman. This quality of being part of both public and private, of also being intimately separated yet connected to the city, has disappeared once the fabric delineating the space was demolished.

In an attempt to summon or recapture the qualities of this lost courtyard in simple terms, the installation forms an elliptical memorial defined by a series of columns with varying densities. Through memory, the space constructs a chronicle of disappearance and points to the impossibility of capturing that which was once lost. It can be seen as a void or as a chamber that holds new possibilities.