The artists from Gaza follow their struggle against a canvas of despair
The incessant buzz of an Israeli drone fills the room.
On one large wall, scenes of death and desperate rescue operations through twisted metal and broken stone play in a video loop. A large pile of rubble – metal bars, bricks and broken plaster – stretches almost the entire length of the exhibition hall.
Along blue walls meant to evoke Gaza's sky and sea, hang paintings that mostly evoke life before Israel's intense bombardment and invasion: Palestinian still lifes, native cacti, music, cats and cows, and even one Catwoman.
The work of more than a hundred artists from Gaza adorns the walls of this exhibition, on view at the Palestinian Museum in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, a protest collection that is as much about the art that is not there and that has been lost in the war. raging in Gaza, but also about the art on display there. Most artists are trapped in the enclave and struggle to survive, let alone create.
“We resist with our colors and our canvases to convey our message to the world,” said Basel El Maqosui, an artist who left his home in northern Gaza and whose work is on display.
“They destroyed our entire civilization and destroyed our modern and ancient artifacts,” he said in an interview. “Each one carries with it a memory full of love and joy, and another memory full of sadness and tears.”
High on the wall in the hall hangs his painting of a Palestinian woman, her head, face and shoulders framed by layers of colorful scarves – red, yellow and blue.
Mr El Maqosui said he was inspired by his neighbor in northern Gaza, a young Bedouin woman who had a unique style of wearing brightly colored Palestinian clothes, wearing four to five colorful scarves around her, regardless of the occasion or weather.
The artists' work in the exhibition, called 'This Is Not an Exhibition', seeks to reflect the texture of Palestinian life, which can be both political and apolitical at a time when Israel's declared war against Hamas is taking a horrific human toll has caused enormous destruction in Gaza.
The exhibition's organizers say they see the show as an act of solidarity with artists in Gaza, offering a way to draw attention to the cultural costs of the war. The exhibition points to a shared experience between Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza who, although divided in geography and governance, are united by common aspirations for statehood after decades of living in various forms under Israeli control.
“Killing the Palestinians, killing the artists, destroying their works, attacking 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, memory and creativity.”
“This is about serving the colonial narrative that Gaza had no life, no art, no culture,” he added.
During more than four 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 area's cultural life that experts say could take more than a generation to reverse. to rebuild it.
UNESCO, the United Nations cultural organization, has expressed concern about the impact of the war on Gaza. The agency 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 over the sound of the drone, Mr. Bseiso called the works of art hanging around him “survivors” because they were sold to collectors, universities and cultural centers outside the Gaza Strip before the start of the war.
Many represent joyful aspects of Palestinian life, while others represent the struggle of what organizers call “the harshness of reality” and the “ugly cruelty of the occupation.”
One painting from 1982 shows a body holding its dismembered head, wrapped in a black-and-white checked scarf known as a kaffiyeh. Another copy, from the 1970s, shows a man in chains and a dead pigeon. Below it hangs a painting from 2016 showing a person whose face is covered by a red bandana with white underwear on it, with the word “return” spray-painted in Arabic.
“This is the voice of Gaza that they are trying to silence,” Mr Bseisso said.
Some of those voices have been lost.
According to organizers, at least four of the artists with works in the exhibition were killed in Israeli airstrikes. Their names are marked on a contributor wall with a black line in the corner of their nameplate.
Mr. El Maqosui has come a long way from the days when he would teach art at a school by day and create colorful art in his home studio by night. His house and studio were razed in an Israeli airstrike, he said.
More than two decades of works were destroyed. “I lost everything I had,” he said.
Now he spends much of his days fetching and filtering water, lining up for food and keeping his family's rickety plastic-sheet tent intact from the cold, wind and rain in the southern city of Rafah.
He still makes time for art, sitting in the tent, wrapped in blankets, sketching with pen in a notebook, his colorful subjects replaced by black-and-white representations of the bleak reality in which he and more than two million others now find themselves. live yourself.
“In these difficult circumstances that are difficult to describe in words, I try to hold on to my humanity through drawing,” he said. “Drawing doesn't change what we experience, but it is a way to convey our suffering to the world.”
When the war began, the Palestinian Museum was preparing an exhibition on music that would open in November. But seeing the death and destruction in Gaza prompted organizers to make a U-turn.
They tore down the walls of the music exhibit and used the rubble to create a pile of rubble in the center of the museum hall.
Shareef Sarhan, co-founder of Shababek, an artist collective and gallery in Gaza City, said the effect “makes you feel like you are entering Gaza with all its destruction.” Mr Sarhan, who lives in Istanbul and Paris, helped put together the exhibition remotely, including suggesting the drone sounds and rubble.
Before the war, the top floor of Shababek was used for artists in residence to focus on their art. It was destroyed by an Israeli attack, said Mr. Sarhan, who was outside Gaza when the war began.
The bottom two floors – where some of the enclave's most renowned artists displayed their sculptures, paintings and mixed-media art installations – remain intact and for weeks housed families who had fled their homes and sought shelter there.
Mr Sarhan says he does not know what happened to many of the paintings, but he believes the families used the wood and canvases to start fires to keep warm amid an acute fuel shortage caused by the near complete siege of Israel.
The exhibition, he said, will allow Gaza's artists to communicate with people outside despite the war, at a time when most of the population is cut off from the rest of the world.
During the war, telephone and internet connections have been frequently cut, either by military airstrikes, power outages or, according to senior US officials, directly by Israel.
“People lose their connection with the outside world, but art can play a role that the artist cannot play,” Mr Sarhan said. “People can see their message and feel your situation. It becomes like a reflection, like an official spokesperson for them.”