4 – 6 January 2024
Private View: Thursday 4 January 2024
Curated by Nadine Aranki & Meg Peterson
This exhibition narrates the story of Palestine through the Gaza Strip, or Gaza, exposing visitors to the daily life and reality of Palestine, and the Palestinian struggle for liberation.
Contributors: The Palestinian Museum, Visualizing Palestine, Artist Shahd Abusalama.
Before 1948, The Gaza Strip was an area of Palestine vibrant and full of life comprised mostly of villages and fishing towns. During the Nakba (Catastrophe), Zionist militias, from which the apartheid state of Israel emerged in 1948, ethnically cleansed the Palestinian people and captured their land. They destroyed over 500 villages, killing 15,000 and displacing 750,000 Palestinians. In Gaza alone, around 130,000 refugees arrived from other towns and villages in the surrounding area. Palestinians, however, managed to rebuild their lives in the refugee camps with limited resources.
Today, Gaza hosts eight refugee camps, and 2.3 million people, including 1.3 million refugees from surrounding Palestinian villages and cities destroyed by the Israel regime. Palestinians and international experts alike have condemned these actions claiming that the aim is to eradicate Palestinian presence and steal land. Following the 2006 siege and the war since October 2023, there have been international calls for ceasefire amid reports of war crimes and genocide.
Despite this, Palestinians continue to live in this land, challenging colonial realities with resilience. Through visual arts and photography, they have recorded abundant memories of themselves and their ancestors. Despite the often-heard claims in Western discourse, this exhibition asserts that it’s not complicated: against colonial greed and violence, a people has struggled for their liberation for over 75 years.
