“The significance of this project lies in its ability to place art at the forefront of a global awakening, to challenge the art field to reckon with the weight of genocide, and to present a model of resilience, and fulfill a desperate need to recognize that the depth and complexity of human life. The right of a people to exist with dignity on their land is fundamental to the purpose of art itself. The work we present goes beyond breaking news, media coverage, and statistics. Despite the sorrow and pain brought by the circumstances, and amid the scent of death, artists in Gaza plant seeds of hope for humanity, not only in Gaza but across the world, through creativity and innovation.”
Al Risan Art Museum (The Forbidden Museum)
Defying genocide, Gazan artists have continued creating—they resist seemingly endless displacements, bombardments, and forced starvation through their art. The Gaza Biennale, initiated in partnership with the Al Risan Art Museum (the Forbidden Museum) in the West Bank, scatters their messages like seeds around the world, dispersing them through local networks of solidarity to create new hybrids. Transcending geography, the Gaza Biennale expands across a human topography that cannot possibly be besieged.
The Gaza Biennale Berlin Pavilion unfolds with exhibitions at venues including Flutgraben, AGIT, Khan Aljanub, Museum Called Baby and Alternatives Denkmal für Deutschland, and programs hosted at Galerie & Atelier Arabisk, Casino Café Clinic for Social Medicine, Spore Initiative and KM28 among others, as well as around the streets of Berlin. With a collaboratively curated public program, the Gaza Biennale Berlin Pavilion invites people of all ages and backgrounds to join in talks, workshops, screenings and other gatherings to practice listening, healing and mourning; share joy and sorrow; and cultivate a communal strength that will ultimately be the key to dismantling oppressive systems based on fragmentation and extractivism—structural relics that lie at the root of the occupation of Palestine and colonial violence worldwide.
The Gaza Biennale Berlin Pavilion is the product of overwhelming popular support. It is realized solely through the effort and personal engagement of numerous volunteers, exemplifying the power of collectivity to not only overcome repressive official infrastructures but build a new one: made from and by the community, small in its constituent parts, but endlessly expansive in its unity.
The opening weekend events can be found here.
