Days before this year’s Venice Biennale closed with the second-highest attendance in its history, more than 50 artists from Gaza announced their decision to form their own version of the contemporary art festival: the Gaza Biennale.
“The biennale will present the Palestinian story, the Palestinian story and the Palestinian cause,” said Tasneem Shatat, the 26-year-old artist from Khan Younis who is leading the effort. Hyperallergic in a telephone interview in Arabic, translated by performance artist Fidaa Ataya. The Gaza Biennale, Shatat said, offers artists from Gaza the opportunity to share their voices with the world amid Israel’s continued attacks on the region.
“I want the world to see these artists,” Shatat said. “It’s a hope for them to make art again.”
In April, Shatat was the inaugural artist-in-residence in Gaza, which was launched in April by the Al Risan Art Museum (also known as the Forbidden Museum), a Palestinian cultural institution “without walls” established in the occupied West Bank.
Based in Ramallah, Ataya founded the museum together with visual artist Andreas Ibrahim. It was inaugurated by the Palestinian Ministry of Culture on top of Al Rasam Mountain which the organization founded said was illegally annexed by Israeli settlers in 2018. Since 2021, the museum says hosted more than a dozen exhibitions at home and abroad.
Shatat and the Al Risan Art Museum are now trying to raise $90,000 for artists in Gaza. According to them, the funds will go directly to artists to finance their practice with the ultimate goal of working with cultural institutions on a transnational level to exhibit those works.
“We also ask art institutions to be courageous,” Ataya said, “to go to work where they can question and study this situation, more than as a result of art.” Ibrahim added that the biennale encourages institutions to “have just an ounce of courage that these artists have.”
Gaza’s Ministry of Health reported last week that more than 44,000 people have been killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023.
With or without a special biennial, these artists have already produced works without any funding during Israel’s war against the region, Ataya said. Hyperallergic.
“Despite incredibly obvious obstacles, even the basic obstacles of supply, they have found ways to still make work that is extremely strong,” Ibrahim shared. Hyperallergic.
Ataya said artists have turned to vegetables and spices to obtain pigments for their works. Some of the funds, she said, will be used to purchase limited materials, but most of those will support the artists’ basic needs.
Among the works included in the biennial announcement is Mustafa Muhanna’s car, adorned in ‘traditional Gazan clothing’, part of the Hope on the road (2024) series, produced with 10 children in Gaza City. In a press release, Muhanna said that in October the area around the artwork was bombed and a large piece of rock fell into the roof of the vehicle.
“We will give them this income to survive,” Ataya said. “As artists they are mothers or fathers, or they are sisters or brothers.” In the north of Gaza the risk of impending famine threatens, while Israeli actors continue to do so block humanitarian aid by force of entering.
Despite representing Palestinian artists at events, the 129-year-old Venice Biennale does not have a dedicated Palestine pavilion, a fact that has been the focus of criticism this year and in previous editions. In February, thousands of people signed a petition urging the Venice Biennale to exclude Israel from the event, following the International Criminal Court’s preliminary ruling in January 2024 that genocide was “plausible” in Israel’s war on Gaza. In April, the artist representing the Israeli pavilion, Ruth Patir, closed the exhibition until a “hostage agreement” and ceasefire was reached, a move that some critics said did not go far enough.
Ataya and Ibrahim said that artists participating in the formation of the Gaza Biennale come from all over Gaza, including the hard-hit areas bombed north.
For Shatat, art is a form of psychotherapy. She said she wants the world to “hear” and “see” artists in Gaza, and that the art could send a message to the world not to “close their eyes” to the unfolding violence.
