‘We Refuse the World’s Nihilism’: Gaza Biennale Roundtable

Initiated in spring 2024 with artist collective Jabal Al Risan, the Gaza Biennale is a decentralized, ‘displaced’ biennial comprising work made by Gazan artists during the war with Israel, which a UN commission has deemed a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. After calling upon the international arts community for support, the organizers arranged for the Biennale to be hosted at 18 ‘pavilions’ in locales as far-flung as Ireland, Spain and Turkey. The show’s North American debut is now taking place at Recess, an experimental art space in New York. Two members from Jabal Al Risan and participating artists Tasneem Shatat and Ghanem Alden met with New York-based writer Hussein Omar via Zoom for this conversation, which was partly conducted in and translated from Arabic.

Hussein Omar The Gaza Biennale emerged out of the work of the West Bank-based Forbidden Museum of Jabal Al Risan, which involves a place in Palestine and the name of an artist collective. Can you tell us a bit about both?

Jabal Al Risan 1 We are a group of artists who’ve looked to the nature of Palestine for inspiration for many years. One of the most beautiful places in the country is the mountain Jabal Al Risan, located in the heart of Palestine. It’s a fertile site for spiritual and artistic practice, with olive trees, grape vines and historic stone-walled terraces called sanasil. For some time, we’ve been walking the trails there, holding performances and making movies.

I first went to the mountain as a child, taken by an artist relative. It got harder to visit after 2018, when settlers came to the region. They put a road right through the mountain and started a colony there – with houses and invasive trees. Soldiers said, ‘This is now a military area. Don’t come here.’ But we still owned the land, so we continued making our art, which they destroyed or stole. They did this to our ancestral sanasil, and to our ancestral trees.

We asked, ‘What do we do as artists in these circumstances?’ The answer: we established the Forbidden Museum. We held events and festivals to give life to an area where creation was forbidden, establishing art studios and residencies. The museum is now barricaded within a special military zone.

Jabal Al Risan 2 To make a slight distinction, Jabal Al Risan is the collective, whereas the Forbidden Museum is a space and registered institution in the State of Palestine. Since they’ve closed the museum and we can’t go there, we aren’t able to practice our art, which is unbearable. As for the Biennale, which grew out of the work of this collective, we should turn to Tasneem in Gaza who had the idea.

We asked, ‘What do we do as artists in these circumstances?’ Jabal Al Risan 1

Tasneem Shatat I contacted the Forbidden Museum, where I had previously done a residency, after being displaced from my home in 2023. I felt that we urgently needed an artistic platform to bring together artists still in Gaza. There are now over 50 artists in our network. We encouraged them to expand whatever they’d been working on for an exhibition based on works they were creating during the war, or that represented some aspect of their experience of the conflict.

There was always a global dimension to our ambition, so we chose the internationally recognized gold-standard for art events, the biennial. The Venice Biennale, for example, invites and hosts international artists in the city. Ideally, then, the Gaza Biennale should host international artists in Gaza, but it cannot. Like we are displaced from our homes in Gaza, so too is the Biennale. It had to go to the world because the world couldn’t come to it and in this way, it manages to traverse borders just as war traverses borders.

In 2024, when we launched the initiative, our entire life was breaking news. We wanted to pierce through this by creating a news story in which Palestinian artists invited the world to host our works in their cities. The open call element was a collective decision. We received many responses, which gave us strength to keep going.

JAR 1 Tasneem first reached out to us because she was interested in art-making in the midst of catastrophe. We asked her, ‘What kind of expertise do you have?’ And she said, ‘I’m a major in mathematics, but I’m really interested in art.’ We broke our own rules by inviting a non-artist to train to be an artist in residence within our museum. But we realized that we can only exist collectively through constantly questioning our own practice. With all that’s happening in the world, does the role of art stay the same or must it evolve? If so, how? What is the role of art, not just in this latest phase of the genocide, but in the horrors Palestinians have been living through for decades?

Ghanem Alden To clarify, there was an open call for artists and then an open call for international partner institutions. We held a historic press conference – the first by visual artists during the war – at the Shuhada al-Aqsa Hospital. There were reporters there because it was a critical moment in the war, but artists came to the hospital to launch the Gaza Biennale. We invited cultural workers of the world to endorse our Biennale and to help us realize it. The response was almost immediate.

[At this point, Tasneem Shatat’s internet connection was lost, and she was unable to continue participating in the conversation.]

JAR 1 It was very brave to even think about this in the middle of a genocide. One could call it a miracle. It was so important because this was about our responsibility as artists, not just in Gaza but the world over. And we thought, ‘Let’s become a global network, a global movement.’

HO How was it working with the different global partners? Were the shows and pavilions different from city to city?

GA It was important to our vision to insist that Gaza was the real home of this Biennale and that it was the international pavilions that were displaced. We also needed it to be clear that all the works being shown were produced under conditions of annihilation, when artists, having lost tools, materials and studios, had to make do with what they could find. We wanted artists to be presented not as victims, but as heroes surviving destruction.

HO Much of the Biennale, like the museum out of which it emerged, focuses on the forbidden. What’s forbidden to leave, what’s forbidden to stay. What’s forbidden to be made, what’s forbidden from being shown. You emphasize this with some curatorial strategies, the most striking of these is that many of the works are digital reproductions of analogue originals, which is another way of emphasizing the prohibitions on the creation, display and transportation of the works. How did you come to this decision? Were other possibilities discussed?

JAR 1 Much of the show was improvised. When we started, we hadn’t imagined that the genocide would continue for so long. We were hopeful that we would be able to bring this work to the world when the war was over. But we realized that the whole point of the Gaza Biennale was that it was a monument to the artists who were steadfast in remaining in Gaza; who didn’t leave and whose work couldn’t leave. We expressed this by way of these reproductions.

We tell the world we refuse its nihilism, that the Palestinian spirit endures through its art. Ghanem Alden

GA Some of the artists were able to get out and bring work with them when the Rafah crossing was open. Some had to leave without their works but remade them in exile. Some works were printed reproductions, others projected or livestreamed. We wanted our works to be liberated from the siege that we ourselves couldn’t escape. The Biennale allows us to refuse the prohibitions of wartime, and the annihilation and the erasure of Palestinian art. These works defy the reality of prohibition. Even as everything was destroyed, even as everything fell, neither paint brush nor pen fell out of the artists’ hands and the artists themselves have, in this way, defied their own eradication.

That art was made in this dark time in Gaza is miraculous – and it’s been achieved, in part, through the Biennale and its artists. Despite its simplicity, it is extraordinary that the Biennale could happen within such confines. We tell the world we refuse its nihilism, that the Palestinian spirit endures through its art.

HO Ghanem, your installation features actual carrots. There’s a long history of Palestinians using fruit and vegetation as symbols, from the olive branch to the watermelon. What does the carrot in your work mean to you?

GA The carrot in my Biennale installation, The Rocket and the Carrot, is derived from the idea of the carrot and the stick in the ​​politics of colonial hegemony. The carrot represents the humanitarian assistance that Palestinians are sometimes granted. ‘Carrots’ aren’t just used in Palestine but everywhere in the world where there’s violent political subjugation.

HO We have talked about what is forbidden in Palestine, and what’s forbidden in Gaza. But the Gaza Biennale is also good at showing us what’s forbidden in the so-called West, or in other places where people mistakenly understand themselves as being free. I am talking about the kind of censorship that Palestinians, and those that stand in solidarity with Palestine, often face in places far outside of Israel.

JAR 2 This censorship is of course what we are trying to bypass. But we are also trying to reflect on this situation. We’re holding a global art event at a time when something should have stopped all our lives, but hasn’t. We are holding two things in our hands that we can’t and shouldn’t. This is what we are inviting people to reflect on. Our binaries are false. Ghanem’s work shows us that. It’s not just Palestinians who are forced to live between aid and destruction, between the rocket and the carrot. Everyone is.

The question of the artwork being displaced is one we have been thinking about since the beginning. From the start we said, ‘We don’t know if we’re going to be able to get your work out.’ So then, what does this say about what art is in the first place? What happens when you show something that’s neither a copy nor an original? What’s this displaced art object? What’s its value? This is an important question for thinking about value in art, not just in Palestine but everywhere.

GA The Biennale is also an archive. We are using it to record our stories for history, because each of our stories is unique and worth preserving. Many of our works have moving stories; they, like us, fought to be there. And there are works, like the people who made them, who did not (and will not) survive.

The Gaza Biennale New York Pavilion is on view at Recess, New York until 20 December 2025, with forthcoming iterations around the globe.

^{Main image: Gaza Biennale New York Pavilion, 2025, exhibition view. Courtesy: The Gaza Biennale and Recess, Brooklyn; photograph: Manuel Molina Martagon}