Resisting with their colours and canvases
“People (in Gaza) are losing their connection with the outside world. But the art is able to play a role that the artist cannot ... It becomes like a ref lection, like an official spokesman for them.” Shareef Sarhan
THE incessant buzzing of an Israeli drone fills the room.
On one large wall, scenes of death and desperate rescues by hand through twisted metal and crushed rock play out on a video loop.
A large mound of rubble – metal rods, bricks and broken plaster – extends nearly the length of the exhibition hall.
Along blue walls meant to evoke the Gaza Strip’s sky and sea hang paintings that mostly evoke life before Israel’s intense bombardment and invasion: Palestinian still lifes, native cactuses, music, cats and cows, and even one Catwoman.
The work of more than 100 artists from Gaza lines the walls of this exhibition at the Palestinian Museum in the Israelioccupied West Bank, a collection of protest that is as much about the art that is not there, lost in the war that rages in Gaza, as about the art that is on display.
Most of the artists are trapped in the enclave, struggling to survive, much less to create.
“We resist with our colours and our canvases in order to relay our message to the world,” said Basel El Maqosui, an artist displaced from his home in northern Gaza whose work is featured.
“They destroyed all our civilisation and destroyed our modern and ancient artifacts,” he said.
“Each of which carries a memory full of love and joy and another memory full of sadness and tears.”
The work of the artists in the show, called This Is Not an Exhibition, attempts to reflect the texture of Palestinian life that can be both political and apolitical at a time when Israel’s “war on Hamas” has wrought a horrific human toll and vast destruction in Gaza.
The exhibition description says the artists are “resisting annihilation in a genocidal war” and showing how “the machine of killing and destruction” is transforming the landscape in Gaza, without mentioning Israel by name or the Hamas-led attack Oct 7 that prompted the Israeli aggression and invasion.
Organisers of the exhibition say they consider the show an act of solidarity with artists in Gaza, providing a way to draw attention to the cultural cost of the war.
The exhibition points to a shared experience between Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza who, while divided in geography and governance, are united by common aspirations for their own state, having lived under Israeli control for decades in varying forms.
“Killing the Palestinians, killing the artists, destroying their works, targeting the cultural institutions,” said Ehab Bseisso, a member of the museum’s board of directors, “is a primary part of the genocidal erasure of history and memory and creativity”.
“This is about serving the colonial narrative that Gaza did not have life, did not have art, did not have culture,” he added.
During the months of war, Israeli airstrikes in Gaza have destroyed many artists’ studios and works, as well as most museums and cultural institutions – a loss to the territory’s cultural life that experts say could take more than a generation to rebuild.
Unesco has expressed concern about the effects of the war on Gaza. It has documented damage to at least 22 heritage sites, including 10 buildings of historical or artistic interest, one museum and three archaeological sites.
Standing in the exhibition hall and speaking above the sound of the drone, Bseisso referred to the artworks hanging around him as “survivors” because they were sold to collectors, universities and cultural centres outside the Gaza Strip before the war began.
Many represent joyful aspects of Palestinian life, while others represent the struggles of what organisers call “the harshness of reality” and the “ugly cruelty of the occupation”.
One painting, from 1982, features a body holding its dismembered head shrouded in a black-and-white checkered scarf known as a keffiyeh.
Another, from the 1970s, shows a man with chains and a dead dove.
Below it hangs a 2016 painting showing a person whose face is covered in a red bandanna holding white underwear on which is spray-painted the word “return” in Arabic.
“This is the voice of Gaza they are trying to silence,” Bseisso said.
Some of those voices have been lost. At least four of the artists with works in the exhibition have been killed by Israeli airstrikes, according to the organisers.
Their names are marked on a wall of contributors with a black line in the corner of their nameplate.
When the war began, the Palestinian Museum was preparing an exhibit on music. But watching the death and destruction in Gaza prompted the organisers to pivot.
They tore down the walls of the music exhibit and used the rubble to make a mound of debris in the centre of the museum hall.
Shareef Sarhan, co-founder of Shababek, an artists’ collective and gallery in Gaza City, said the effect “makes it feel as if you are entering Gaza with all its destruction”.
Sarhan, who lives in Istanbul and Paris, had helped put the exhibition together from afar, suggesting the drone sounds and rubble, among other ideas.
“People are losing their connection with the outside world. But the art is able to play a role that the artist cannot,” Sarhan said.
“People can see their message and feel your situation.
“It becomes like a reflection, like an official spokesman for them.” —