At a modest gallery space in Brooklyn, the walls hummed with grief, resistance, and an astonishing vitality. Recess, the nonprofit venue on Washington Street, has become the stage for the Gaza Biennale’s first North American stop — a roving, decentralized exhibition that refuses to let Palestinian art be erased by siege, genocide, displacement, or famine.
Titled ‘From Gaza to the World,’ the New York pavilion gathers works by 25 Palestinian artists who are either still living under bombardment in Gaza or only recently displaced.
Nearly all of the works arrive in reproduced or reimagined form — projected murals, printouts of paintings, a facsimile of a notebook — what organizers call “displaced objects.”
Bearing Witness Under Siege
Some of the show’s most haunting images echo universal symbols of war and survival. Firas Thabet’s Gaznica (2025) recasts Picasso’s Guernica, inserting keffiyeh-clad figures and Palestinian flags into the chaos.
Nearby, Malaka Abu Owda’s When the Body Became a Message (2024) depicts the unbearable — a man screaming as he cradles a corpse — yet insists on the dignity of the dead.
Children also appear, such as in Murad Al-Assar’s faux-naive canvases, which capture a child covering their ears as bombs fall.
In Mohammed Moghari’s Tent (2025), a fragile shelter becomes both home and symbol, an emblem of millions displaced.
And beyond canvases, Filmmaker Emad Badwan’s Live Broadcast (2024) stages two journalists desperately trying to transmit from a refugee camp, asking into the void: “Can anyone hear us?” The lack of signal becomes a metaphor for silenced voices.
Art as Survival, Not Luxury
For the artists of Gaza, making art is not a pastime but an existential act. Fatima Abu Owdah recalls working with makeshift materials: pigments ground from spices, brushes fashioned from strands of hair, even walls of tents turned to canvases.
Further testament to this, Ahmed Adnan Alassar paints surreal panoramas with ashes from destroyed homes. These gestures declare that creativity itself can survive catastrophe.
“The Biennale invites us to engage with art’s capacity to reflect an unimaginable present,” Recess’ spokesperson said in a statement.
A Decentralized Global Movement
Unlike a traditional traveling exhibition, the Gaza Biennale operates through pavilions curated separately across the world — in Athens, Istanbul, Valencia, Sarajevo, Berlin, and now Brooklyn. It nods to the structure of the Venice Biennale, which famously lacks a Palestinian pavilion.
In New York, the show runs in two stages: a five-day full-scale exhibition (September 10–14) followed by a smaller installation that remains until December 20. Future pavilions are planned in Toronto and Washington, DC, extending the reach of what has become both an artistic and political lifeline.
Art Against Erasure
The Gaza Biennale emerges in a time of catastrophic loss. Since Israel’s 2023 offensive, nearly 65,000 Palestinians have been killed, 70 percent of them women and children, according to Gaza’s health ministry. Famine has been declared by international bodies. Hundreds of cultural institutions — universities, mosques, libraries — have been destroyed. Against this backdrop, the Biennale insists on memory, on presence, on the stubborn endurance of culture even under genocide.
This is exactly embodied in Moataz Naim’s tragic work, which evokes nothing but destruction and ashes.
“Art is necessary in order that man should be able to recognize and change the world. But art is also necessary by virtue of the magic inherent in it,” wrote Ernst Fischer. For the artists of Gaza, that necessity is urgent. Through this Biennale, their work carries Gaza’s truth and resilience across borders, from the ruins of war to Brooklyn and beyond.
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