Key of Return is a grassroots event series for Palestine, brought together by fourteen Gazzawi artists, six non-Gazzawi artists, a few cultural organisers and curators, and countless helping hands. At heart, we are a decentralised collective of friends—working like the tentacles of an octopus: each part working independently and engaged with their local communities, yet all connected by a shared core.
We organise events to raise funds for artists and their families in Gaza, but also to build community, to grieve death, and to celebrate life. We are united in our commitment to liberation from all forms of oppression, and we fiercely condemn the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Refusing immobility, we organise through the strength of community, believing that art is a powerful tool of resistance, memory, identity, and solidarity. We aim to amplify voices that are silenced and, through art, claim existence and shared humanhood.
Our exhibition:
In ‘Ayda Refugee Camp, just outside Bethlehem, every single resident has been exposed to tear gas bombs, often multiple times a week, making it the most tear-gassed community ever documented. In order to get there, you must drive along the separation wall, where breaths are skipped as petrol burns.
One more turn and there you are–the place where Akram Wa’ra and his family greet you: This is my wife, these are my kids, my niece who is visiting. Warm hellos and cheerful thank‑yous before the most delicious feast enters your mouth—just like the Palestinian key turning in the lock of a house on returned land.
Not so long ago, Jerusalem’s neighbourhoods Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan witnessed yet more Palestinian homes expropriated; khalas? You left my hand holding a key without the house it opens! In this exhibition we return to the shades beneath the olive trees, to the scent of jasmine in Jaffa, the mulberries of Ramallah, the flower tatreez of Khalil, the steadfast mountains of Nablus, the sea that cradles Gaza.
In the art you are about to see, you’ll encounter a reimagined homeland—where tear gas bombs are turned into jewellery, where a grandfather’s memories are etched into every corner of the city, where smuggled sperm brings life from within Israeli prisons, where colour becomes an escape from grief, where the landscape is liberated from colonialism, where hibiscus tea returns as oil on canvas, and where “free blood will inherit the land”, once again, in Gaza.
Welcome, everyone—for this is your home. It has no key, for it was never meant to be locked.
Exhibition: Key of Return: 14th – 18th August 2025 in the Glogauer Art Gallery, Berlin.
More information on Instagram.
