Opening of the “New York Pavilion” of the Gaza Biennale at Recess in Brooklyn (all photos Diba Mohtasham/Hyperallergic, unless otherwise noted)
The nearly 10-minute docudrama Live Broadcast by Palestinian filmmaker Emad Badwan opens with the voice of a man over a scene of people walking through a refugee camp. “We never imagined that all the cameras would be useless,” he says, seemingly to another, though just as well to the viewer. “That all the filming would be pointless if you can’t deliver the image. If no one can see your picture.”
As the mechanical hum of a drone gradually intensifies between close-up shots of life in the tents, it becomes clear that the narrator is one of two broadcast journalists trying to find a reliable signal. Drawn from Badwan’s own experience as a photojournalist in the central Gaza Strip, the film reflects both the practical obstacles and the grim realities of reporting on the ground at a time when communication is under siege and amid Israel’s ongoing killings of members of the press.
The short is just one of the many artworks displayed in the inaugural “New York Pavilion” of the 2025 Gaza Biennale, which opened yesterday, September 11, at Recess in Brooklyn, the Biennale’s first North American host site. The show will be on view through September 14, followed by an abbreviated version of the exhibition in the front half of Recess’s galleries that will be up for three months until December 20.
A visitor reads about Ahmad Aladawi’s By Fire by Blood (2024) series of wheat-pasted posters.
Titled From Gaza to the World, the local exhibition brings together 28 of the more than 50 artists included in the global show, many of whom are still based in Gaza or recently displaced. Their works span a variety of mediums and styles, from painting to video to installation, nearly all of which had to be digitally reproduced for the shows — though not as simple “copies,” in the words of the Gaza Biennale organizers, but rather “displaced objects … signs for a message that has traveled across borders and the siege.”
The New York edition follows earlier presentations in multiple cities, including London, Athens, Istanbul, and Valencia — all dubbed “pavilions” in a nod to the exhibition model of the Venice Biennale. Though Palestinian artists were included in ancillary events in the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024, the contemporary art festival does not have a dedicated Palestinian pavilion. The event’s Israeli Pavilion, meanwhile, drew widespread condemnation from artists and activists, who shouted “No death in Venice” in protests during opening week last year.
Paintings by Mohamed Moghari projected on the walls
Instead of a single traveling show, each presentation is curated separately, a decentralized approach that allows local curatorial partners to shape and adapt the programming to their respective contexts.
“We are responding to a condition of displacement that is now a reality all over the world,” said a spokesperson for the Forbidden Museum of Jabal Al Risan, founded in the Occupied West Bank, which launched the Biennale in 2024. “For a long time now, we have been asking the art world to engage with this contemporary condition. What value will it place on a displaced object born under every restriction imaginable?”
Firas Thabet, “Gaznica” (2025), on view at the Gaza Biennale
Installation view of the Gaza Biennale with “The Rocket and the Carrot” by Ghanem Diab Saeed Al Den
Intimate video screenings with 15 artists at the Recess gallery entrance offer a glimpse into such restrictions, as well as the precarious conditions of creating under constant threat. Destroyed studios, constant outages, material shortages, and sheer individual exhaustion make artistic practice nearly impossible, compounded by the logistical and financial hurdles of sending original pieces abroad.
Yet the artists also recount the process of adapting, of transforming their pain to continue making. “Art is not a luxury for us, it is a means of survival,” visual artist Alaà Al Shawwa told Hyperallergic in an email.
Works by Ahmed Adnan Alassar projected on a wall in what organizers called “a message that has traveled across borders.”
To create her piece, painter Fatima Abu Owdah improvised with pigments made from spices and coffee, fashioning brushes from strands of her hair, using the walls of her tent as a canvas with charcoal when no paper was found. Ahmed Adnan Alassar collected leftover ashes from burned homes to construct his surrealist panoramas, which were projected onto two gallery walls. Osama Naqqa resorted to his phone to sketch while in shelter, his own fingers as pencils, the lines of which become visible when close up.
Taken together, the dozens of pieces seem to ask: in the face of more than 700 days of catastrophic devastation, what persists and what can endure? Or, as Owdah put it, “We do not die in silence; we resist with sound, color, words, and with every last beat of our hearts.”
