‘You could be looking at the last surviving works by Gaza’s artists’
Paintings from Gaza on display at ‘This is Not an Exhibition’ in the Palestinian Museum, Birzeit, West Bank, May 2024
Fatima AbdulKarim reports in +972 on 16 May 2024:
In a large hall, dim lighting casts long shadows over a pile of rubble, while the incessant buzzing of drones echoes all around. Such is the somber greeting for visitors entering an exhibition currently on display at the Palestinian Museum, in the occupied West Bank town of Birzeit.
“This is Not an Exhibition,” which runs until August, showcases some 300 artworks by Gazan artists. Walking around the hall is something of a sensory overload, pulling visitors between visual and auditory stimuli. Paintings crowd around each other in no particular order on the museum’s darkened indigo walls, evoking the chaos of the ravaged Palestinian art scene in Gaza.
The art pieces, collated since December from galleries, institutions, and collectors across Palestine, are a testament to Gaza’s cultural production in its darkest hour. Some of the artists have been killed in recent months by Israel’s bombardment. A few managed to escape the besieged Strip. Most of them are currently displaced within it.
Chris Whitman holds the artwork ‘Asdood’ by Heba Zagou
The exhibition is an attempt both to capture and counteract what the organizers describe as the “erasure” of Palestinian life and culture in Gaza. This includes the destruction of the Strip’s two contemporary art galleries: Eltiqa, in downtown Gaza City, was destroyed in an Israeli airstrike in December, while Shababeek, which was housed in an old building close to Al-Shifa Hospital, was reduced to rubble when the Israeli military laid siege to the hospital complex and much of its surrounding area in March. Artists from both galleries, almost all of whom have been displaced due to the war, were granted space in the Palestinian Museum to showcase their work.
“The entire art scene, its people, productions, and spaces, have been profoundly impacted by the devastation of war,” lamented Sharif Sarhan, the director of Shababeek, who spoke to +972 from Paris where he was staying before the war broke out and has since remained. The majority of art still inside Gaza has either been destroyed or damaged by Israeli attacks, or looted by residents in a desperate search for materials to burn for fire. “You could be looking at the last surviving works produced by Gaza’s artists,” Sarhan added.