There is a lot to think about in a one-room exhibition at the nonprofit Brooklyn art venue Recess, where the Gaza Biennale has touched down for its first North American outing. Including 25 Palestinian artists, “From Gaza to the World” is what the organizers are calling the New York pavilion of a roving exhibition they have termed (after some debate) a biennale, launched in 2024 and since then developed by the Forbidden Museum of Jabal Al Risan.
Seeing this show is an exercise in feeling powerless, and I’m afraid anything I say in the face of these works will be hopelessly banal. But it is essential viewing. Set against the context of the ongoing Israel-Gaza War, the exhibition bears witness to life under bombardment, famine, and displacement. Artists keep creating work, desperate to express themselves, to be heard, to be remembered, to live.
Malaka Abu Owda, When the Body Became a Message (2024). Courtesy of the artist and the Gaza Biennale.
Many of the artists in the Biennale continue to make work in Gaza, while some are displaced. The organizers of the Gaza Biennale said that the show “makes evident the challenges that Palestinian artists face in presenting their work globally, raising questions such as: how do you exhibit art that’s inaccessible while under siege, yet endures despite a genocide?”
Israel launched its war in Gaza in 2023 with the stated goal of eliminating the threat from the militant group Hamas, which attacked a music festival on October 7, killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking 251 people hostage, many of whom have yet to be released. The resulting military action in the Gaza Strip has seen its infrastructure destroyed, with nearly 90 percent of its population displaced. Gaza’s Health Ministry estimates the death toll at more than 64,000, about half of them women and children. The World Health Organization and a UN-backed panel have declared a famine in the territory and Amnesty International, the United Nations special rapporteur, and some countries have alleged Israel is committing a genocide. Israel denies the claim, calling the war an act of self-defense.
Mohammed Moghari, Tent (2025). Courtesy the artist and the Gaza Biennale.
Since it is difficult for people and artworks to escape Gaza in the current conditions, many of the objects on view are documentation of the art being produced there: printouts of paintings, a facsimile of an artist’s notebook, and the like, with wall labels specifying the materials of the original pieces. Many of the works are straightforward, offering documentary presentations of life in displaced persons camps, and mournful renditions of death and destruction. Extensive wall labels include heartbreaking quotes from the artists and plentiful biographical information.
Greeting visitors near the entry is a small tapestry by Firas Thabet, Gaznica (2025), which adapts Picasso’s famous antiwar painting Guernica; a tearful woman in a keffiyeh overlooks a scene of wailing women, with Palestinian flags waving. A wall text notes that Guernica, too, was reproduced as a tapestry, in which form it hangs in the United Nations headquarters, just a few miles away.
Fatima Ali Abu Owdah, How Alone You Were (2025). Courtesy of the artist and the Gaza Biennale.
Some of the most powerful words in the show came from the artist Fatema Abu Owda, accompanying printouts of sand-hued ink drawings with text from Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s book . “No one survives here,” she says, “they just slowly decay. I search for peace among the remains of those who are gone.”
Emad Badwan’s docudrama Live Broadcast (2024) shows two journalists in the West Deir al-Balah refugee camp, helmeted, in flak jackets emblazoned with the word “press,” trying to broadcast from a rooftop overlooking endless tents. “Guys, can anyone hear us?” one asks, noting that there’s no signal to be had. It’s an effective metaphor. The camera studies children playing hopscotch, building sand castles. Voices complain of missile strikes on civilians. A lot of the action takes place as one of the journalists waits in an interminable bathroom line.
Emad Badwan, film still from Live Broadcast, (2024). Courtesy of the artist and the Gaza Biennale
A painting of a destroyed city by Motaz Naim could be an allover abstraction; it has the misfortune here of being reproduced only in a projection, so we have no idea of its scale or texture. But it does effectively echo photos of whole neighborhoods reduced to rubble, and reminds the viewer that landscape painting can be profoundly political.
Murad Al-Assar has four paintings on view, in a faux-naive style, one showing a girl who had her leg amputated; another shows four children, a bomb over each one’s head; another shows a child trying to block their ears from the noise of war as bombs drop in the distance. Text nearby relates the artist’s experience of trying to distract his children from terror on a winter night among the noise of war. The painting of the amputee is based on a rendition of the girl by his 13-year-old daughter, who said that she “should appear strong.”
Motaz Naim, The Mural in the Silence of Destruction, from the series “Gaza and Its Destroyed Cities” (2024-25). Courtesy of the artist and the Gaza Biennale.
The show gives rise to some thoughts. It’s seemingly an article of faith among many people in my circles that art is “impotent and frivolous,” as Art in America’s Emily Watlington recently put it, and that feeling is easy to understand in a context where the market drives much of the conversation, and art is often positioned as a luxury.
Murad Al-Assar, Noise of Death (2025). Courtesy of the artist and the Gaza Biennale.
Their lives under constant threat, these artists continue to make work in an open-air prison at best, an open-air mass grave at worst. Are they foolish to believe in art’s efficacy? “Poetry is not a luxury,” wrote Audre Lorde. “It is a vital necessity of our existence.” So, too, is art for these artists in Gaza, and therein is its power.
“From Gaza to the World” is on view through September 14 at Recess, 46 Washington Street, Brooklyn, New York. An abbreviated version will be on view September 18–December 20. Other iterations of the Biennale are soon to be on view in Walla Walla, Washington; Istanbul; Athens; Valencia, Spain; Sarajevo; and Berlin. Other pavilions appeared previously at other European sites, and future exhibitions are planned internationally.
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
