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Palestinian artists in Gaza plan to stage a “biennale” exhibition as an act of defiance against Israel’s military onslaught and to focus attention on the plight of the territory’s 2.3 million people under more than 13 months of bombardment.
About 50 artists from Gaza will exhibit their work within the besieged coastal strip, and are looking for art galleries to host exhibitions overseas. But in order to hold their work to the eyes of the rest of the world, the artists are facing a unique challenge: how to get their art across Israeli siege lines.
About a quarter of the exhibiting artists managed to cross into Egypt earlier in the war. Of those left behind, some will try to send artworks out of Gaza with aid workers who are sporadically allowed to cross the lines; others will send material electronically in the form of pictures and video, while a few will partner with artists in the West Bank to reconstitute their art remotely.
Tasneem Shatat, a 26-year-old from Khan Younis who helped come up with the idea and is a driving force behind the initiative, explained why the artists chose to emulate Venice and other major world cities in calling the proposed show a biennale.
“The biggest artistic events in the world are called biennales, hosting the world’s most important artists to address the most important things in the world through their art. For us, the most important artists in the world now are the artists of Gaza,” Shatat said.
The name is also a statement of intent that the biennale will be a recurring event and that Gaza and artists will still be standing in two years’ time.
The idea is intended as an artistic proof of life in the face of an attempt to strip Gaza’s Palestinians of their humanity. It started as a conversation between artists who were seeking each other out to check their friends were still alive, and to compare notes on not just how to survive but how to continue to make art under fire and with rarely enough to eat.
“The war stole a lot of things from us and the people of Gaza and it continues to steal everything and yet the world stays silent,” Shatat said. “We want international institutions around the world to host these drawings and paintings and put them on display. We won’t tell the stories the world already knows well, but we will tell you about the rebirth of the darkness of injustice, we will tell you about a life in the midst of death.”
The organisers say that, if a host is found abroad to stage a Gaza Biennale, it will be an event unprecedented in modern times: artists under siege and starving managing to stage an exhibition on the world stage.
Muhammad al-Hajj, a 42-year-old artist and teacher now sheltering in the Nuseirat camp in the central area of the Gaza Strip, has tried to keep up his drawing even while he and everyone around him are struggling for basic necessities.
“There is a lack of food and water, there are no tents and we are on the verge of winter,” Hajj said. “At the same time I am short on pens, colours and paints. Even if they do become available, they are several times the normal price.”
Hajj once had a studio in Gaza City but he has lost all that and has been moving from one tented camp to another. He said he planned to export his works, many of them allegorical drawings of Palestinian suffering, either through collaboration with a West Bank artist who would reinterpret his pieces, or by photographing them in high definition and sending them electronically to be printed on boards.
“Through art, we send a message to the world that we are still alive, and as long as we are still breathing we can shine a light on everything that is happening here,” Hajj said.
At the very beginning of the war, in October last year, Rufaida Sehwail’s house was bombed and her family had to claw their way out of the rubble to find many of their friends and neighbours lying dead on the street in the Rimal district of Gaza City.
“This experience does not end with the bombing – these moments carry with them a mixture of fear, shock and helplessness, and the scars last a long time,” said Sehwail, who was an art teacher and lecturer before the war.
In the bombing Sehwail lost 17 years of work as an artist, and a library of nearly a thousand books, and she has been on the move, fleeing the bombing, ever since. She has been displaced seven times.
Sehwail, 37, sees the prospect of a Gaza Biennale as a chance of a fresh start as an artist.
“Continuing to create art in the midst of war and oppression in Gaza is not just a creative act, it is an act of resistance and survival in itself,” she said. “While Israel focuses on erasing life and culture in Gaza, my continuity in art proves that life is still going on, and that the Palestinian identity will not be erased.”
In a manifesto launching the Gaza Biennale, the artists said it represented “a creative step outside the traditional frameworks of exhibitions. It reflects the sensitivity and specificity of our situation, making it an urgent and exceptional event. At the heart of the artistic purpose is the struggle of a people to survive.”
The Gaza Biennale project is in its early stages and depends on the intervention of an art gallery or national museum abroad to make it a reality. But Shatat is optimistic.
“All the artists’ works will come out,” she predicted. “They will see the light, and they will cross barriers, borders, and laws, and the whole world will see them. This is the power of art.”
