\n<\/p>\n
A<\/span>rtists will go on creating, even under the most extreme and inhumane of conditions. This truism is part of the message and the power of the Gaza Biennale, which is currently working to exhibit the art of dozens of Palestinians around the world \u2013 including in New York City, where the abolitionist arts non-profit Recess hosts an exhibition of work from more than 25 of these artists.<\/p>\n \u201cThey are artists, they need to create art,\u201d said the Biennale organizers, who are currently located in Gaza and requested to be identified as the Forbidden Museum. \u201cWe need to help artists stand up for themselves with their skills. Just because you are an artist in the middle of a genocide doesn\u2019t mean you don\u2019t have anything to do.\u201d<\/p>\n Part of the conception of the Gaza Biennale is the notion of displacement \u2013 due to the ongoing war, it is not possible to host the Biennale in Gaza, nor is it possible to transport the artwork to places around the world in order to exhibit it. So the organizers have had to find ways to showing the work in displaced formats.<\/p>\n As co-director of Recess Lindsay Harris put it, the Gaza Biennale reinvents the concept of a biennale to make it applicable to Gaza, which is currently under blockade and being devastated by relentless warfare. \u201cIn a biennale, everybody comes to one location to experience the world, but here it\u2019s the world experiencing one location, Gaza.\u201d<\/p>\n Work from the Gaza Biennale has been shown in places such as Edinburgh, Valencia, London and Padua, with current plans for upcoming showings in Istanbul, Athens, Sarajevo, Berlin and Toronto, among others.<\/p>\n \u201cWe discussed with each artist that we didn\u2019t know how their work is going to be exhibited,\u201d said the Forbidden Museum. \u201cWe don\u2019t know exactly how we\u2019re going to reinvent it, recreate it \u2013 not make a copy \u2013 so that the work can exist in this \u2018displaced state.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>Ashraf Sahweil \u2013 Remains of Waiting (A Branch). (2025).<\/span> Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and the Gaza Biennale<\/p>\n Many of the artists participating in the Biennale have endured devastating losses \u2013 according to the show organizers, roughly three-quarters of the artists in the show have seen the destruction of all of their prior artwork and have had to effectively start over during the war. \u201cWe\u2019re dealing with artists who have lost their entire life\u2019s work,\u201d said the Forbidden Museum. \u201cEverything is gone. What does it mean to create a work in that situation? These artists found the strength to start from scratch again from nowhere.\u201d<\/p>\n The artists describe their practice as a way of sustaining themselves through the unthinkable. Their work largely deals with the day to day realities of living in a brutal warzone in which civilian casualties have been estimated as high as 83% of the total deaths.<\/p>\n \u201cDuring the war, art became a means of survival for me,\u201d said Murad Al-Assar via a translator. \u201cThrough painting, I was able to release my pain and distress, transforming fear into images that tell our stories. The experience taught me that painting is not just an aesthetic space, but a testimony to our lives and a means of conveying our voice to the world.\u201d<\/p>\n Al-Assar creates in conjunction with children, integrating their own art creation into his process in order to see the world through their eyes. This has allowed him to work with a \u201cnew energy\u201d. \u201cTheir innocence and simplicity allow me to see the world from a clearer and more honest perspective,\u201d he said. \u201cTheir spontaneous drawings open new doors of expression for me and inspire me to reconnect with art as a space for play and dreaming, not just as a tool for documentation.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>Murad Al-Assar \u2013 Noise of Death (2025).<\/span> Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and the Gaza Biennale.<\/p>\n Another participating artist, Tasneem Shatat, shared her view that the creation of art has been vital to her survival. \u201cI see art as a form of psychological therapy that teaches you how to deal with or at least escape the terrible reality we are living in,\u201d she stated, via a translator. \u201cArt does not reduce pain, but it allows you to know how to use it in your own way to either get out of your situation, be patient, meditate or heal a little, even if the situation is one shock after another.\u201d<\/p>\n Shatat sees her artistic practice as creating a \u201cliving archive in Gaza\u201d where she collects the stories of other Palestinians that she has encountered along the way. \u201cIt is an artwork in the form of a book that contains an archive of the memories of displaced people and their reality, which I archived for history.\u201d<\/p>\n Harris explained that in order to exhibit the artwork in the Biennale, she and her team came up with the means of reinventing the art in its displaced form. For A Tent on the Road, a mixed media collage made by Maysa Yousef, she chose to create a print in order to best represent the many different textures present in the original. \u201cShe\u2019s looking at her own displacement across multiple sites and what it means to recreate home within a tent,\u201d said Harris, \u201cHow do you recreate home again and again and again? I think we all do that, especially here in New York.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>Maysa Yousef \u2013 A Tent on the Road (2024).<\/span> Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and the Gaza Biennale<\/p>\n The idea for the Biennale was sparked by a simple gesture \u2013 a Palestinian woman approached the organizers of the Forbidden Museum with the desire to create art. At first, the Forbidden Museum was taken aback by such a gesture. \u201cWe were shocked that there was a young lady who\u2019d like to be an artist now,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n The Forbidden Museum eventually helped this woman set up a residency and begin to create art, and through that process they began to evolve the idea of seeing what art was being made in Gaza and how it could be shared with the outside world. \u201cWe were looking for a big event to join, but we never thought we would be the big event,\u201d they said. \u201cThis is important within the history of art, that there are people in Gaza creating art now, that they are encouraging each other and sharing their work, that they are interested in being seen and that their exhibitions could somehow break the blockade and siege.\u201d<\/p>\n For the Forbidden Museum, the act of letting the world see that art is being made in Gaza is extremely powerful. It gives a voice to those who have been radically disempowered, letting them speak on their own terms and in their own voice. \u201cIt\u2019s about how we can affect others, how we can let people see there are artists in Gaza making art now,\u201d they said. \u201cIt\u2019s about those artists who feel amazing when someone hears them. They might be done tomorrow, so they need to be heard.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Artists will go on creating, even under the most extreme and inhumane of conditions. This truism is part of the message and the power of the Gaza Biennale, which is currently working to exhibit the art of dozens of Palestinians around the world \u2013 including in New York City, where the abolitionist arts non-profit Recess<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21495,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[3153,13189,1485,13190,1233,853,2851,1754,476],"class_list":{"0":"post-21494","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-art","9":"tag-biennale","10":"tag-city","11":"tag-exhibitions","12":"tag-gaza","13":"tag-lands","14":"tag-means","15":"tag-survival","16":"tag-york"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21494"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21494\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/21495"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}