Dor Guez Munayer (born in Jerusalem) is an artist whose practice is shaped by acts of return: to particular places, images, narratives, and material traces, revisited over years and sometimes decades to trace how their meanings shift over time. Moving between personal, communal, and institutional contexts, he approaches the historical record through its inconsistencies and omissions, considering how images, environments, and material objects shape what can be seen, remembered, and transmitted. The past, in this sense, becomes a way of encountering the present.

Guez’s work initially took shape through the experiences of three generations of his Palestinian family and his community in Lydda. Drawing on personal documents, oral testimonies, archival materials, and photographs and films he produced, he developed an approach in which private accounts enter into dialogue with broader narratives without being absorbed into them. He has continued to return to Lydda throughout his practice. Other bodies of work have drawn on the experiences of his Jewish family from Tunisia, including their migration after family members were released from forced-labor camps during the Second World War. These distinct inheritances remain present in his work not as parallel narratives to be reconciled, but as different positions from which to consider how knowledge is produced, transmitted, and continually reinterpreted.

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Over the past two decades, Guez has documented and mapped the transformation of landscapes and architectural sites. His work has increasingly considered how testimony can reside beyond the human witness. An abandoned house, a wild plant, a domestic object, a road, or a military structure can retain evidence differently from a photograph or spoken account. His work considers how such evidence endures, disappears, or acquires new meanings over time.

Central to this approach is the distance between an event and the forms through which it is recorded and transmitted. What remains is never complete, and what is reconstructed never returns unchanged.

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Community Programs & Institutional Initiatives

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Guez’s practice extends beyond individual works into long-term archival, curatorial, and institutional initiatives. He established the Samira Munayer Archive in 2006, originating from the family albums of the al-Munayer family (Guez’s maternal family), and subsequently expanded through contributions from Palestinian families and communities. He is also the founder and director of SeaPort Art Center for Curatorial Research, established in 2018 and based in Athens, an independent artist-led platform for research, residencies, and public programs. Through preservation, research, curatorial exchange, and public programming, these initiatives create structures for transmitting and circulating knowledge across communities and generations.​

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Exhibitions & Performances 

Guez has presented over 65 solo exhibitions internationally at institutions including Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico City; Princeton University Art Museum; MAMBO – Museum of Modern Art, Bogotá; the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University; Museum for Islamic Art, Jerusalem; DEPO, Istanbul; and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin.

His work has been included in the 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, the 12th Istanbul Biennial, the 17th, 18th, and 19th editions of Videobrasil, the 24th Bienal de Arte Paiz, and Videonale.19 at Kunstmuseum Bonn, as well as exhibitions at Palais de Tokyo, Paris; MAXXI, Rome; ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe; K21 – Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; The Jewish Museum, New York; Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin; Museum Villa Stuck, Munich; and Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris.

Guez’s performances bring together photographs, archival materials, historical objects, and spoken analysis, and have been presented at institutions including Centre Pompidou, Paris; Princeton University Art Museum; the American Colony Archive, Jerusalem; and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin.

​Selected Public Collections

Guez’s works are held in the collections of Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles; Guggenheim Abu Dhabi; Princeton University Art Museum; The Jewish Museum, New York; MAMBO – Museum of Modern Art, Bogotá; The New York Public Library; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts; and FRAC, Marseille.

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Publications

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Guez’s work has been the subject of 11 internationally publications and monographs, released by publishers including Kerber Verlag, Distanz, New England Press, and the A. M. Qattan Foundation.

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Guez lives and works in Jaffa and Athens. ​

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