Abdul Rahman Katanani, is a Palestinian contemporary visual artist, that was born in 1983 in the Sabra refugee camp in Beirut, Lebanon. In 1948 after the Nakba, his grandparents escaped their hometown Jaffa, Palestine, and settled in a refugee camp in Beirut. From the age of eight, until college, Katanani worked alongside his father, a carpenter helping him install roofs made of corrugated zinc-metal sheets on top of the concrete cubicles of refugees. He received his diploma in Fine Arts from the Lebanese University in Beirut in 2007 and an MFA in 2012 on Palestinian contemporary art. He went on to perform several artists residencies at La Cite des Arts foundation in Paris in 2012, 2013 and 2016 which helped shape his practice.

 Katanani believes in cultural interactions and crossing boundaries through art. In his body of work, the artist tackles themes such as displacement, borders, trespassing, and freedom. Palestine is omnipresent in his work and has become an allegory for all the displaced in the world. He is well known for his collection of assemblages incorporating zinc metal sheets, pre-used garments, kitchen utensils, and laundry pegs; materials collected from the refugee camp. The materials seem like scraps, but, for Katanani, they symbolise the survival kit of a refugee: shelter, food, and clothing.  Inspired by the children of the camp who would make toys from trash, he took pictures of them then enlarged the figures’ silhouettes and cut them in corrugated zinc metal sheets. In the work Girl Chasing Pigeons despite the seemingly heavy material both in physical and symbolic terms the artist succeeds in depicting a lightness through the innocence of a child playing around chasing pigeons.

 In 2019, Katanani received a French passport and since then he lives between Paris and Beirut. He has had solo and group exhibitions in Abu Dhabi, Beirut, Paris, London, Kuala Lumpur, Doha, Brussels, Rome, Geneva, Manama, Marseilles, Munich, Washington DC. In 2013, French writer and filmmaker Christophe Donner produced a feature film, entitled Le Lanceur de Pierres, based on Katanani’s experience. In 2016, Katanani was nominated for the commitment prize at YIA Art Fair in Paris, and in 2008 and 2009 he received prizes from the Sursock Museum in Beirut.