Third Text

7 April 2026

T J Demos

Eltiqa Group for Contemporary Art is a collective based in Gaza City, founded in 2000. For more than two decades, its members – including Mohamed Abusal, Mohammed Al-Dabous, Abdel Raouf Al-Ajouri, Mohammed Al-Hawajri, Raed Issa, Dina Matar and Sohail Salem – have developed artistic practices collectively. Their work has included establishing a dedicated exhibition and workshop space in Gaza City, supporting younger generations of artists through workshops, exhibitions and spaces for meeting and dialogue, and showing their artwork abroad (including at documenta 15 in 2022, organised in collaboration with The Question of Funding collective). This continuity was ruptured in October 2023, when Gaza was irrevocably transformed by Israel’s relentless and ongoing assault. This interview with five members of Eltiqa (‘Encounter’ in Arabic), conducted for Third Text, took place over text messages in early 2026 and has been edited for length and clarity.

TJ Demos:   Dear all – Mohamed Abusal, Mohammed Al-Hawajri, Raed Issa, Sohail Salem, and Dina Matar – many thanks for doing this interview, for your time and generosity in the face of ongoing and unbearable duress. My gratitude to Yazan Khalili for helping to arrange this interview and for translating when necessary. It is so important to hear your voices at this time of the non-ceasefire and late-stage genocide in Gaza. As a first question, can you offer a brief account of how you got to this heartbroken place that we call the present, after the last two years of unfathomable violence?

Mohammed Al-Hawajri:   Talking about this subject brings us back to painful and difficult memories – memories filled with loss, destruction, displacement, hunger, fear, exhaustion and the absence of any sense of a future. All of this was part of my life during my time in Gaza, from 7 October 2023 until the moment I left Gaza on 2 April 2024, arriving in Cairo and then moving on to the UAE, where I now live with my wife (Dina Matar) and children, trying to start a new life from absolute zero.

I never expected to live in exile, as I had previously rejected this option. I had been offered opportunities to live abroad more than once and in several countries due to my frequent travel over the past twenty years. Now, however, migration has been imposed on us by force, with no clarity about the future: will we ever return? Or have we become another repeated image of our grandparents who involuntarily left Palestine in 1948 and ended up scattered across the far corners of the world? This reality exhausts me even more whenever I think about the future of my children: will they ever return? In any case, this is a very large subject that will branch out in many directions, as it is connected to many things – family, homeland, home, future, art and life in Gaza, destiny and exile. I look forward to talking more about all of this.

Sohail Salem:   First of all, it’s a pleasure to meet you dear TJ Demos. I am still in Gaza. I did not migrate to the south at the beginning of the war, despite the extreme danger, but the occupation army arrested me when they stormed my residence in Gaza City, the southern neighbourhood of Al-Rimal, and separated me from my family, forcing them to flee on foot to the city of Deir al-Balah. This was on 18 January 2024, 105 days into the war. The soldiers interrogated me while I was handcuffed and blindfolded, and they wrote a letter in Hebrew on my forehead. The men around me whispered about the meaning of this and whether it meant the army would kill me first?! After long hours of interrogation, they released me to walk for about seven hours as well. I arrived in Deir al-Balah. After the second day of searching, without any evidence or information, a call led me to my family’s location.

Displacement, trying to survive, my family, and the difficulty of securing food and water were my priorities. How am I coping with life now? Has anything changed in our lives? More frustration. Art and politics don’t mix, but the surrounding circumstances nonetheless influence my artistic output, and I can’t be detached from the reality we live in. Is it possible to overcome what happened? Do I feel let down by the world? Can art influence and change anything in our lives, or is it merely a narration of events and a documentation of the tragedy and devastation that occurred? Many questions arise about the loss of family members, friends and neighbours. I made some drawings during the war in Gaza, where I still live. Unfortunately, my family and I were unable to leave.

Sohail Salem, drawing, 2024

Dina Matar:   As a visual artist from Gaza, I currently reside in the United Arab Emirates after leaving Gaza during the war. Before the war, I worked as an art teacher for fifteen years, in addition to my work in exhibitions and participating in art workshops. When I worked as an art and crafts teacher, I taught in the Shuja’iyya neighborhood, which is now part of the restricted ‘yellow line’ area. I loved this area very much, especially Jabal al-Muntar in Shuja’iyya, where we could admire the beautiful view of Gaza from above and take souvenir photos. I taught middle school students, and many of these students, along with their families, were killed in the war.

Now that I’ve left Gaza, I miss my beautiful life there. We spent about six months living in tents under the harshest conditions with no basic necessities. This was during the bitter cold, near the Egyptian border in Rafah, after losing our studio and home in the Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza strip. We then decided to travel and leave Gaza. I left behind my father, mother and all my siblings, who are still struggling in Gaza. They experienced famine due to shortages of food, and a lack of medicines and clean water. Being away from them makes me constantly sad. I follow the news all the time, hoping to hear good and happy news about them. I hope to see them as soon as possible.

Raed Issa:   After two years of genocidal war, and after many painful and repeated attempts, I finally managed to leave Gaza, leaving behind far more than a place – I left an entire lifetime. I was living in Gaza City, behind Al-Shifa Hospital near the Eltiqa Gallery, when the war began and the bombardment intensified (the gallery was destroyed in an Israeli airstrike in December 2023). I was forced to flee with my four children to UNRWA schools in the city, where the school we had taken refuge in was bombed while we were inside. By a miracle, we survived and managed to escape alive. I left my memories, my dreams, my home, which was not merely walls but a living archive of my life, and my studio that held years of artistic work, searching and hope. I left carrying an unknown fate, even as I arrived in a country that is said to be a land of freedoms.

After one month of war, on 21 November 2023, I was displaced to the Al-Mawasi area of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, where I lived in a tent near the sea. Following the Israeli ground invasion and occupation of Rafah, I was forced to flee once again, this time to Deir al-Balah. I remained there until I was evacuated through the French Consulate to Jordan and then to France at the end of April 2025. In France, I was awarded a grant from the PAUSE Program as a researcher and artist at the Ecole Supérieure d’Art in Aix-en-Provence. I continue to work as an artist, producing artworks and drawings drawn from memory and lived experience. My current practice focuses on developing and expanding the artistic and documentary works I created during the war, as an artistic resistance.

Physical survival does not mean complete survival. Exile, no matter how many possibilities it offers, does not erase loss, nor does it ease the weight of memory. How can one overcome the martyrdom of a mother? How can words contain the loss of family members – some killed, others wounded, others left with amputated bodies? This pain is neither forgotten nor tamed; it is borne every single day. Gaza never leaves me. It lives within me – in the smallest details of my daily life, in consciousness and subconsciousness, in sleep and wakefulness.

Mohamed Abusal:   After seven months of living through a war of extermination, my children decided that we should leave the Gaza Strip and look for a safer country, as they had only ever known a life of siege and military escalation. It took about four months to plan our departure from Gaza, as it was a complicated matter. We finally managed to leave for Egypt, where we stayed for five months until I obtained a grant and a contract to work as a researcher in alternative museums at a university in France. Today, we live in Marseille in southern France, and my children attend regular schools here. I have resumed my artistic activity after a hiatus from practising art.

This time it was not the military escalation we are accustomed to from the past, but rather something new, a genocide with all its brutality, and details beyond comprehension. From its very first moments, it was clear and it affected everything without exception, like a tsunami hitting us. I realised that it would destroy our bodies, our dreams and everything we had built for our future. I used to record all the ideas and plans that came to mind for producing artistic projects. I tried to do that this time, but failed because it is only possible to interpret horrific scenes artistically when one is in a state of mental and physical stability. I deleted what I had recorded as ideas in my diaries. Experiencing the scenes around me, I turned from an artist into a displaced person with dulled senses like everyone else. My days burned, I spent them thinking about the necessities of life: water, food, clothing and medicine. Time passed in monotonous repetition, a frightening repetition accompanied by erosion and helplessness. After hearing the news that my home and studio had been bombed and all my work, archives and notes had been burned, I was struck by something even more shocking: how could all this be destroyed or disappear? There has been a great deal of desecration during the ongoing destruction of Gaza.

Also, TJ, it would be good to know where you are now, and a brief account of how you arrived at this situation we call the present, after more than two years of unbelievable violence.

TJD:   Many thanks all. I’m so sorry to hear about the loss of family members, friends, neighbours, the uprooting and continual displacement, the ongoing existential insecurity and violence from Israel’s US-supported war machine – words fail in such moments. I can’t even begin to imagine what you’ve all been through. I’m reminded of what the Gazan writer Taqwa Ahmed Al-Wawi wrote last October, that ‘what we face is more than a mere loss of words; it is the collapse of the symbolic system that language represents’. ^[1]  Perhaps we can only reassemble language from its ruins – even while, as Sohail says about his drawings in this time of utter destruction, ‘our lives have become lines’: life forms torn from substance, home, environment, community. ^[2]

For my part, I write from California, where I work at the University of California, Santa Cruz. My research focuses on contemporary art and politics, and I’ve followed the situation in Palestine for many years (one of my earliest published essays, over two decades ago, examined the work of Emily Jacir, with several more pieces about Palestinian art since). Over the past couple of years, I have witnessed the genocide in Gaza live-streamed from afar – with unbearable sadness and feelings of powerlessness – following it closely in the independent news and on social media, alongside the collapse of the political credibility of the United States and the liberal West. The professed commitment to an international order grounded in human rights and the rule of law – always a façade masking elite western political and economic interests and military aggression – has been laid bare by the material and diplomatic support for genocide and the continued, unquestioned endorsement of Zionist settler colonialism.

At the same time, I’ve been deeply inspired by the emergence of social movements, led in large part by students on university campuses, who have refused complicity, demanded divestment from US and international corporations supplying weapons, surveillance and AI technologies to the IOF [Israeli Occupation Forces], and have amplified the voices of growing numbers who oppose Zionism’s racist colonial ideology. I’m a member and supporter of Faculty for Justice in Palestine and of the Democratic Socialists of America, which has consistently opposed Israel’s actions, including long before the most recent assault. As an editor at Third Text, I’ve supported the forum ‘Thinking Gaza’, initiated in February 2024 in response to the art system’s widespread silence and the urgent need to address the situation of cultural politics.

As artists, how have you all thought about art, if at all, during this chaos? What has changed? Art seems impossible during genocide – a privilege, a risk, a non-thought – but also perhaps a necessity, a refusal of the foreclosure of the imagination, a rejection of surrender, a vital mode of expression, a means of survival. How do you, as artists from Gaza, think of it from today’s perspective?

Mohammed Al-Hawajri, Instagram post, 23 November 2025

Mohammed Al-Hawajri:   For me, art became a suspended act. It did not cross my mind at any moment during my time in Gaza, nor did I consciously consider making a decision about it. I believe the reason is that, in moments of war, a person is completely stripped of the ability to think about anything other than survival – clinging to life more desperately than ever. To be exposed to death without reason, simply because you were born in an unstable place, turns you – your children, your family, and everything you own – into a target. Even life itself, even dreams become forbidden, because they are liable to be assassinated.

In such a situation, art becomes a suspended act, because it, too, becomes a target. During this war, my studio – carefully built as a refuge from the burdens of life imposed on us during the siege of Gaza – was bombed. That place was destroyed along with everything it held: dreams, ambitions, even the plants I had cultivated for more than twenty years on my rooftop. They grew, they lived – and they, too, were assassinated.

When losses accumulate so densely, art turns into a moral and human stance taken by artists. They are compelled to take a position in situations like this – like the genocide in Gaza. But here, art reveals its true power: it ceases to be a luxury or a decorative gesture and becomes an alternative way to express rage. It provokes audiences to confront reality. Art becomes a final attempt to organise what cannot be organised. Destruction, death and displacement do not negate art; rather, they strip it of the illusion of power and of the claim that it can save. What remains is its human trace – a sign that says: Here once were people who loved life and hoped to fulfill their dreams.

In times of collapse, art is not produced to be immediately understood or applauded, but to bear witness. And testimony – even if fragmented or incomplete – remains a quiet act of resistance against erasure. Chaos does not ask the artist for answers. It merely places them before a merciless mirror and asks: Are you still able to see amid all this loss and destruction?

Mohamed Abusal, watercolour, 12 January 2025
Sleep forever; that the annihilation will reach you to the stage of wrapping yourself in the patterned quilt...
like a beautiful cocoon... you will become a butterfly flying to the sky to meet God... there at the highest station...
you will complain to Him about what mankind has committed... you belong to God and to Him you will return

Mohamed Abusal:   Due to the severity of the repeated harsh scenes, which became a way of life, it was necessary to alleviate the accumulated effects, so I resorted to venting and confiding on paper, and I recorded the days of displacement in writings and ink drawings on paper... Perhaps this would ease the pain of suppressing those hidden feelings. These drawings were accompanied by explanations of new realities that our eyes and ears were becoming accustomed to. Among them:

This is not decoration or beautiful architecture!
Rather, it is pain mixed with false comfort. Consider the matter for the sake of survival and the land. To resist extermination in the Gaza Strip.

This disorderly queue!
It is the last moment the eye sees before families are erased from the civil registry, or their bodies are covered by their children, brothers, a grandfather with his sons and all his grandchildren and infants (from the memory of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir Al-Balah).

This is not a restaurant!
It is a translation of starvation policies, where people line up for hours with their own food containers because this restaurant has no waiters or even a menu.

Gaza 2023
The final scene of a film watched by the whole world, in which the actors played their roles with great skill according to the wishes of the directors and screenwriters, sees a hundred heroes leave the scene every day, most of them talented children, to be replaced by a hundred more, and the scenes continue until the desires of the devils are satisfied.

Raed Issa:   Even at the height of genocide and destruction, I was constantly searching for life, for any opening of light. Art became that opening, despite the impossibility of the conditions and the absence of even the most basic artistic materials. I was living in a tent, and from there I launched my initiative ‘My Studio in the Tent’. I transformed a fragile space into a place for life. I gathered my children and the children of the displacement camp, not only to teach them drawing, but to offer them a moment of safety, and to remind them – and myself – that we are still human beings who deserve joy. I will never forget their faces; their eyes radiated light, love, and hope for a better future, even though they had been deprived of the most basic elements of childhood.

At the same time, I documented daily life through my drawings: the suffering of children, the resilience of women, the harsh cold of winter, the suffocating heat of summer, and how a piece of fabric could become the only possible home in a collapsing world. I drew with whatever was available – nothing more. I used charcoal, tea, leftover coffee and hibiscus as substitutes for paint, and scraps of cardboard replaced paper. This was not an aesthetic choice, but an existential necessity. This artistic act was what gave me the strength to continue living. Art was not a luxury; it was a means of survival and a living testimony to what was being committed against both land and people. I produced numerous works that narrate our daily realities – documenting pain while preserving dignity.

My works stand as witnesses to what is happening to an unarmed people facing one of the strongest armies in the world, possessing nothing but a great heart, an unbreakable will to live, and a simple desire to exist in freedom and dignity.

Raed Issa, tent studio, 2025

Dina Matar:   I’m trying to resist through my art and prove that art has no limits. I’m trying to paint beautiful pictures of Gaza and also depict my memories so that they can reach the whole world in peace and tranquility. During the war, I always felt the need to paint, but the harsh living conditions prevented me from doing so. Fear was constant. Our days began and ended with us searching for the basic necessities of life: food, water, cooking over fire, washing clothes in cold water, and living in tents in the bitter cold. I managed to create only one painting, done with acrylics on paper. It depicted love and war and was exhibited in Dubai at the Jameel Art Centre.

As for my only painting created during the war, it speaks of the difference between war and love in this era; each resists the other. But love always prevails, striving to survive and soar to the highest heavens, even with wings as light as butterflies. For love is the only truth capable of resisting aggression and injustice.

Dina Matar, painting, 2024

TJD:   Thank you all. Raed and Dina mention the importance of love. I’m reminded of an essay I read recently, ‘Love in a time of Genocide: A Palestinian Litany for Survival’ by Sarah Ihmoud, who writes: ‘we must continue to love and affirm each other, and our communal struggle for life – the very thing our colonizers can never exterminate. Our refusal is a form of love.’ ^[3]  Maybe that’s what Eltiqa’s collective work also represents, sending missives of love and life from within an imposed state of siege and destruction.

The genocide has driven a massive rupture into the web of life and love, even while its unfolding, its political transformations and altered realities, may be impossible to fully comprehend. Does this rupture re-emerge, then, in the aesthetic, even while artmaking is ever precarious, even at times impossible? Mohammed, you’ve stated elsewhere that, unlike some artists who don’t support remaking destroyed artworks, you are ‘displaying them as they are after their destruction and pairing it with a text that testifies to each work’s experience. As such, these works would serve as an artistic project, as part of our memory, and as a witness to the extent of the destruction that has affected everything, even the art and cultural scene in Gaza, which is an integral part of the Palestinian struggle.’ ^[4]  It appears that aesthetics under genocide can’t but not exhibit the destruction of one’s ability to put meaning into form.

Mohammed Al-Hawajri:   In truth, I have always tried to avoid inserting conflict into my artistic work. I was consistently careful not to let politics interfere with art, because I believe that politics corrupts everything it touches. However, I eventually realised that it is impossible to escape a reality that forcefully imposes itself on every aspect of Palestinian life. In Palestine – and Gaza in particular – we almost breathe politics, even when we do not intend to. Unfortunately, the world has placed us within this framework, and I believe that everything coming from Gaza is globally perceived as political. Art has not been spared; any artwork from Palestine is judged in advance as political art, even before it is seen.

At this point, I try to create what I feel represents me – what I want people to see about my life. I no longer concern myself much with judgments, even when some of them are harmful, because they stem from opposing perspectives that attempt to portray me in ways that make audiences fear the presence of my work in international spaces. Often, I employ dark humour in some of my works to bring them closer to audiences who know little about the nature of the conflict.

Sohail Salem:   How did I create art during wartime, amidst all this chaos? The idea of ​​drawing seemed ridiculous. What could I draw in such circumstances?! And why? My brain was damaged from the sound of intense bombing that still resonated in my head. I began drawing in Deir al-Balah. It was a mission for me to release a visual store of misery I had stored in my mind. This was most brutal when I was forced to pass over the bodies of martyrs during the displacement. Overcrowding of the displaced and listening to the news on the radio at high volume, I tried to separate myself from my surroundings every morning and draw. My small, sharp and disturbed drawings encapsulate fear and anger in a narrow notebook space.

TJD:   In the shadow of the recent past, has the role of art been reconfigured? That is, in a broken world that seems to have lost all meaning, including the breakdown of international law, systems of justice and human rights institutions that have failed to intervene and stop the genocide? If art has been drawn to narration and documentation during the catastrophe – like in other times of crisis – what about now?

Sohail Salem:   I always wondered if art is necessary, and what its necessity is in our lives, especially for Palestinians. Certainly, art during wartime is not a luxury. I used drawing with simple, inexpensive tools for emotional release and to reframe events, moving away from direct narration. Instead, I was expressing the human condition in general, and I called it ‘A Scream for Help’. These were messages from me to the free world and my fellow artists that we are suffering and facing death every moment, without mercy. Where are the voices of reason and human rights in the face of this great tragedy that has befallen a people subjected to injustice and displacement?

Perhaps my drawings are messages of despair from me to the world; no one has been able to stop this war. I published my drawings whenever I could, so that some friends would know that I was still alive. ^[5]  Every day in our lives has a story, and consequently, mixed feelings of denial of what we are experiencing, disbelief in what is happening, and acceptance because it has actually happened. Sometimes I feel like I’m in a nightmare, and I will wake up from it, and everything will be alright.

Sohail Salem, drawing, 2024

Mohammed Al-Hawajri:   I believe creators have a major role in these circumstances. Art history offers many examples – most notably, for me, Picasso’s Guernica, which became both an icon and a witness to a dark chapter of World War II. ^[6]  That painting transformed war into a document and an archive, demonstrating the importance of the creator in the most difficult moments.

Today, the role of art can be summarised in several key points:

​•​   Preserving memory: When news cameras grow tired, art becomes a visual and emotional archive – not literal documentation, but a human memory that resists erasure.

​•   ​Breaking media flatness: Art is capable of disrupting simplified media language and offering narratives that are closer to global audiences, revealing the bitter reality lived daily by Palestinians under a clearly broadcast genocide.

​•   ​Recentring the human being: News often reduces Palestinians to numbers or stereotypes, while art can present them as complete human beings, entitled to a dignified life like any other people.

​•​   Conveying human sincerity: Creators are often the most sensitive and truthful in conveying emotions, expressing positions, and defending human rights – beyond the Palestinian cause alone. As artists, we must stand alongside oppressed peoples everywhere.

The relationship between art and politics has never been a matter of choice; it is a matter of reality. Politics seeps into the body, into language, into memory. When an artist works honestly within this condition, their work becomes political – even without raising a slogan. Art does not begin from ideology, but from the human experience shaped by politics on the ground. What has changed over the past two years – particularly in light of what has happened in Gaza – is not the nature of this relationship, but its intensity and exposure. Silence itself has become a political position. Art can no longer hide behind claims of neutrality, because neutrality in a moment of genocide turns into a form of indirect complicity.

Gaza did not ask art to speak on its behalf. Rather, it exposed the fragility of global artistic discourse and revealed the gap between the values championed by contemporary art – freedom, the body, memory, justice – and their actual practice when the cost becomes ethical. Many art institutions chose safety over position, leaving the ethical question naked: for whom is this art produced? And who is allowed to speak? Perhaps the function of art has changed – from a space of contemplation to a space of accountability. It is no longer enough for a work to be visually or conceptually ‘good’; it must confront the conditions of its production, its context, its silences. Art does not stop wars, but it can fracture singular narratives and preserve what politics attempts to erase. In this sense, art is not a substitute for political action, but one of the last remaining spaces capable of telling the truth.

Mohammed Al-Hawajri, The Confrontation, digital print, from the Guernica-Gaza Project, 2010–2013 (posted on social media in 2024)

TJD:   Mohammed, these collages of yours, which situate colonial violence in Gaza within key examples of European avant-garde art – also presented at documenta 15 in 2022 – are so poignant in puncturing the hypocrisy of western universalism and its selective histories that commemorate the European victims of past fascisms, even as they exclude condemnation of the atrocities and genocide in Palestine. Your images expose and refuse what Hanan Toukan describes as the ‘epistemicide’, the destruction of cultural knowledge and forms of knowing, which ‘fuel[s] the logic of dehumanization, racialisation and stereotyping’ that enables military domination. ^[7]

What about Eltiqa as a collective? I imagine that over its more than two decades of existence, it has served as a lifeline, a form of mutual aid, a resource for survival, particularly when organised society and governance have been shattered, when even humanitarian aid, under the occupier’s terms, has been instrumentalised toward death and destruction?

Your website mentions several initiatives, including Eltiqa’s youth-led project that ran a visual arts space devoted to education, training, production and dialogue, supporting emerging artists through a range of projects and programmes. Other programmes over the years have included Art Shelter (Malath Al-Fan), a supportive environment for artists in Gaza while connecting them locally and internationally through workshops, residencies, exhibitions and an art lab; the Gaza Contemporary Art Program (GCAP) (2013–16), offering theoretical and practical training in contemporary art; and GAZ’ART, a workshop series encouraging young artists to experiment and produce new work across diverse media.

Raed Issa:   Our Eltiqa group holds a special significance, first and foremost through its artists, with whom we founded this group and transformed it into an entity and a place that brings us together, and brings together many artists as a family and friends working together with love and passion. Eltiqa was both a human and artistic space, where we met through creativity and shared ideas, and believed that collective work has a different form and taste. The diversity of opinions gives it greater beauty, strength and depth.

Over the past two years, due to the war, we were forcibly compelled to stop working collectively because of the danger of gathering and the bombing of the Eltiqa headquarters. Nevertheless, communication did not completely cease. I continued to meet with some of my colleagues from the group who were with me in Gaza – Sohail Salem and Raouf Al-Ajouri – through irregular meetings imposed by the difficulty of moving between the areas in which we were displaced. These meetings served as a refuge for us, where we spoke about the details of our daily and personal lives, the challenges we faced, ways to overcome them, and how to obtain even the simplest art materials amid the siege and exceptional circumstances.

These meetings were also a space for consultation about our personal artistic production created during the war, whether from an aesthetic or expressive perspective. We exchanged views on our work and reflected together on the importance of continuing artistic production not merely as a creative act, but as a means of expression and documentation during wartime.

Among the most important projects and exhibitions we realised over the past two years, while I was still in Gaza, was the exhibition ‘Eltiqa: How To Work Together’ at Art Jameel in Dubai (researched and curated by the Palestinian artist collective The Question of Funding). I succeeded in presenting a group of works that I produced during the war specifically for this exhibition, which provided an important opportunity for my drawings to leave Gaza while I myself remained there. Thus, even in the harshest circumstances, the spirit of Eltiqa remained present, affirming that art and collective work can be acts of resistance, memory and testimony to the annihilation of stone, tree and human life that we are living through.

Raed Issa, drawing, 2024

TJD:   Was art able to somehow intervene for you within the unfolding of the crisis, with its always changing, shifting and unpredictable conditions on the ground, revealing possibilities even as others were violently cut off? Maybe it has helped to challenge censorship, media disinformation, propaganda – even in small ways?

Mohammed Al-Hawajri:   During the second year of the genocide, the artistic scene became active again with remarkable force – thanks to friends and fellow artists who remained in Gaza or had been there. They practised art with the simplest tools available, using whatever materials they could access. Sohail used worn-out school notebooks and ink pens, producing a large number of daily drawings that express what he felt – danger, hope, memories. Raed used coffee, pomegranate, and whatever materials were available to create unconventional works. In such cases, we can say that art infiltrates the body like blood – it pulses with the heartbeat. This is why those who encountered these works felt more deeply affected and closer to the truth.

What art can do is, perhaps, not speak about Gaza, but disturb the world through it – to disrupt comfortable narratives, refuse reduction, and keep the wound open against attempts at normalisation. Art does not offer readymade meaning; it creates a space that cannot be easily closed. Perhaps the most important role of art today is to say: The genocide is bigger than me, but I will not disappear. To stand as an unarmed witness, knowing it may not be rewarded or even seen, yet insisting on presence – at a time when a fully structured genocide is being carried out. Art is not a hero in this critical moment. It is an act that must persist in refusal – so that genocide does not become something we learn to live with.

TJD:   Alongside the targeting of civilians, Israel’s attacks on journalists, museums, archives, libraries, universities, students and professors, an additional modality of genocide has been the attempted destruction of the collective capacity to record, document, image and remember: in other words, the attempted destruction of collective sensibility – or sense-ability – what might be called aestheticide. And now, with plans for redeveloping Gaza, Trump’s grotesque ‘Board of Peace’ real-estate speculation built on the ruins of killing fields – an arrangement that journalist Sharif Abdel Kouddous has described as a farcical expression of twenty-first-century colonialism ^[8] – we face the destruction of destruction, the erasure of the genocidal crime scene, as a further means of defuturing Palestinian Gaza.

Mohammed Al-Hawajri:   What I understand is that human beings always seek truth. Despite all technological advancements in transmitting reality through high-quality images, sound and diverse platforms, during moments like the genocide in Gaza we still see attempts by the powerful to distort, deny or question facts – efforts aimed at destroying global solidarity with Gaza, because that solidarity has become disturbing to them. Here, I believe that everything we do as artists from Gaza constitutes an act of soft resistance – one that has found resonance and welcome in many countries around the world. This in itself is a profound achievement made possible by art, because it is often the closest bridge to audiences seeking connection and solidarity beyond the familiar stereotypes.

TJD:   So here, again, Eltiqa’s work provides vital testimony that accounts for some of that genocidal violence, and a refusal of its erasure, a refusal of aestheticide, an insistence on existence, on Palestinian life and futurity.

Mohamed Abusal:   I ponder the difficult question: ‘What does extermination mean?’ Especially after I lost the archive of my work, which I had produced over more than three decades. This extermination raises many questions and perhaps leaves us confused and arguing, because we are certain that no one will answer those questions. Rather, it is up to us to come up with the answers, because we are the ones who have been subjected to extermination. I used to reflect and observe a lot, on everything that was new in our lives. Extermination is carried out to the letter, with all that is required for it to be achieved. Its details were invisible to the eyes of the world, until it became an inevitable matter or fate... Until I found myself reflecting upon, and contributing to, the literature of extermination – in thinking and writing about my own drawings, which have expressed the effects of genocide on me. In this literature of extermination:

To be assassinated in your passion, in your love of nature, in your creation of beauty! I cannot recover from this shock, nor can I determine the extent of the criminality of this occupation. I remember my garden on the roof of the house that was completely destroyed during the genocide in the Gaza Strip. How can this passion be taken away from me? To be assassinated in your history, when you lose the archive of your achievements and your memoirs, even the works that were due to be documented will remain only in our oral memories. I recall every moment of my work over three decades, when I found traces of it burnt and completely destroyed.

In terms of the question ‘what can art offer, if anything’, I am still trying to understand the power of art, its ability to embarrass the machines of war and destruction. I still have doubts that anything can stop the violence, and no matter how powerful art is as a language, unfortunately politics and capitalism stand in its way. Wars do not spare artists or give them safety. Like everyone else, they are mixed in with everything else. Perhaps regimes oppose freedom of expression, especially the arts, because they are a visual language that everyone understands. But I repeat the saying that ‘power cannot defeat imagination’. An artist’s ability to use their imagination may enable them to surpass politics and translate everything they dream and imagine.

Sohail Salem:   This is due to art. Art has an impact, and I consider it a form of symbolic resistance that can evolve and influence the international community because art reaches hearts before weak political rhetoric. But tyrannical governments are far removed from art. What if the money spent on war had been redirected to investing in humanity, lifting sieges and achieving freedom? The cost of peace is far less than what was spent on war machines and destruction.

Art raises an issue, and you are free to accept or reject the opinion, but humanity remains paramount. Why do psychopathic generals rule, with the justification for killing always readily available? Where is the good, and is it strong, or is evil stronger? I used to draw the details of our daily lives and the human dignity that is violated – the suffering of women and children. Through art, I cried out to the world that we are an educated and cultured people with the right to life. The journey of art will not end, and the suffering and effects of war will continue as well.

Dina Matar:   For us, art is an emotional document that complements historical documents throughout the ages, serving as a true witness to the genocide in Gaza. Documenting genocide through art – despite and in the face of all the destruction – is not merely recording an event; it is preserving memory, creating a historical record, resisting oblivion, and giving a voice to countless victims and martyrs.

TJD:   Since Eltiqa was founded in 2000, it has endured for nearly twenty-five years – an extraordinary lifespan for any collective. Many dissolve under the strain of internal conflict or exhaustion. Do you think Eltiqa’s longevity is in some way bound to the adversity from which it emerged? Did the very conditions of crisis and constraint become the force that held it together?

And finally, what future do you envision for Eltiqa? In the aftermath of Gaza’s devastation over the past two years, with members displaced across Gaza and scattered internationally, can the collective continue? How do you imagine its next chapter, and what plans, if any, are beginning to take shape?

Mohammed Al-Hawajri:   Thank you very much, dear TJ. Yes, now we are in a new phase. We will certainly continue because art is part of our lives. Now we are participating in different exhibitions. We can show the voice of Gaza in a different way. We continue to consult and discuss together in order to preserve our art, which is our life. In response to the first question, we haven’t considered this exactly, but I think what has kept us going is that our collaboration isn’t governed by traditional rules. We work together as friends with dreams and ambitions, with varying approaches. We each work according to our capacity without any coercion. We always co-operate to solve problems amicably so we can continue. And most importantly, we are all artists who love what we do, and we all share in the success despite our differing abilities.

Mohamed Abusal:   Yes, we are currently working on collecting and storing all digital materials online to make them readily available, whether for archiving the group's history or for any future research. We are also rewriting the text to describe our past activities. Additionally, we are documenting several completed exhibitions for publication on the website.

Teamwork comes within the context of shared responsibility, and belonging to the group compels us all to respect our collaboration and its responsibilities. Working in this initiative is entirely voluntary, and there are no financial returns or profits for the group. The primary goal is the preservation of our art. Decision-making processes are not easy, and we often seek advice from friends and experienced institutions.

Raed Issa:   No one can guarantee the future, yet we will continue our artistic work and production, despite some of us being in Gaza and others abroad. Despite the genocide, and the constant state of uncertainty and anxiety over what is happening in Gaza, including to our families and friends, we cannot live without art. We remain committed to our resistance through art. Our presence abroad represents an opportunity to expand our reach and hold exhibitions in different countries. This year, 2026, we have the opportunity to present the exhibition ‘Eltiqa: How to Work Together?’ at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, ^[9] as well as an upcoming opportunity at the Northern Norwegian Art Museum. We are also working on additional proposals. We believe we are on the right path toward broader visibility and strengthening our collective artistic practice.

TJD:   Many thanks to you all.
 

^[1]    Taqwa Ahmed Al-Wawi, ‘In Gaza, We Are Literally Losing Our Ability to Speak’, The Nation, 1 October 2025, accessed 24 March 2026

^[2]    Sohail Salem and Annelys de Vet, ‘Our Lives Have Become Lines’, in In the Absence of Bombs: Art, War, and Silence, Pascal Gielen and Bahia Shehab, eds, Valiz, Amsterdam, 2026, pp 166–179

^[3]    Sarah Ihmoud, ‘Love in a Time of Genocide: A Palestinian Litany for Survival’, Journal of Palestine Studies, vol 52 no 4, December 2023, pp 87–94, accessed 24 March 2026

^[4]    Ayham al-Salhi, ‘In War, Muhammad Al-Hawajri Gives Color to His Rage’, Institute for Palestine Studies Blogs: Arts and Culture, 22 March 2024, accessed 24 March 2026 

^[5]    See Diaries from Gaza – Sohail Salem, Zitto Editions, ChertLüdd Books, Berlin, 2026

^[6]    Editor’s note: This perspective found resonance in a contemporary Guernica action, where thousands of people in the Basque city of Guernica itself formed a human mosaic – creating a Palestinian flag overlaid with an excerpt from Picasso’s iconic painting – to express solidarity with Palestine, drawing an explicit line between the fascist bombing of the city in 1937 and the current ongoing genocide in Gaza. See ‘Guernica stands in solidarity with Gaza’, Peoples Dispatch, 12 December 2023, accessed 24 March 2026.

^[7]    Hanan Toukan, ‘Refusing Epistemic Violence: Guernica-Gaza and the “German Context”’, Afterall, vol 57, Spring/Summer 2024

^[8]    See Sharif Abdel Kouddous, ‘“Emperor” Trump’s So-Called Board of Peace Erases Palestinians from Gaza Governance’, Democracy Now, 23 January 2026, accessed 24 March 2026

^[9]    See ‘Eltiqa: How to Work Together?’, at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), 21 August 2026 – 28 March 2027

T J Demos is Professor and Chair in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies, and Distinguished Visiting Professor in the VIAD Research Centre at the University of Johannesburg. He writes widely on the intersection of visual culture, radical politics and political ecology – particularly where it opposes racial and colonial capitalism. He is a member of the Editorial Board of Third Text.