Free Reality

The New York “pavilion” of the Gaza Biennale is not just another art exhibit. It engages with the task of rebuilding a reality that is not colonial white reality, one that can see the full extent of this genocide, of course, but one that offers a glimpse of the liberation to come beyond it. In the tradition of Frantz Fanon of Martinique, writing about Algeria in 1957, this work “far from expressing political unrealism, ….is the demand for a revolutionary realism.” My sense—my hope—is that this is the demand Gaza’s artists are making of those of us who can see their work “outside.”

The first sentence of the wall text at the entrance of Recess, the Brooklyn experimental space that has been converted into the pavilion, warns “This is not a cultural event.” The phrase resonates with the ongoing exhibition of art from Gaza created in the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit immediately after October 7th, “This Is Not An Exhibition.” According to the museum’s website, “the mere mention of art seem[s] a luxurious disconnection from reality.”

Two years later, there is a different task at hand, as Gazan artist Kholoud Al Dosouqui puts it on the Biennale website: “Through art, which is a message in itself, we seek to create a tangible change in the reality of Gaza.” Let’s call that “free reality,” where free is at once a verb, an adjective and a noun.

What’s the real here? Let’s take our cue from ACT UP chronicler Sarah Schulman, who calls solidarity: “the essential human process of recognizing that other people are real and their experiences matter.” That recognition creates what Viet Than Nguyen calls “expansive solidarity,” the collective application of the right to look. It counters what Fanon called the “systematic dehumanization” of colonialism.

Beyond White Reality

Free reality is the real outside the dominion of imposed white reality. I take the name from the anti-colonial sousrealism, a displacement of white reality and white sight from “below,” just as surveillance is countered by sousveillance. It is beyond realism, it is a realism from and of the abyss. In this vein, Suzanne Césaire saw, while her native Martinique was under fascist occupation, how anti-colonial surrealism could engender “the freed image, dazzling and beautiful.”

This free image is both one of freedom and a way of seeing liberated from the colonial and white supremacist “window on the world” used to manage populations and target weapons. Like Marx’s “old mole” of revolution, it is is only intermittently visible, otherwise returning to what Césaire called the “abyss of freedom.”

The question posed by the Gaza Bienniale is whether it is possible to glimpse this freedom in the abyss that is the genocide? Just as Rebecca Solnit has identified idealist communal and communist ways of organizing the social in the midst of catastrophe, does the intensification of the Nakba into something beyond what could ever have been imagined allow a certain freedom to become perceptible, even as it is very far from being present?

For Biennale artist Firas Thabet the present is indeed “the birth of something else.” In Capital, Marx stressed: “Violence is the midwife for every society pregnant with a new one. It is in fact a kind of economic power.” This gestational labor, a violent, fleshly entanglement between capital, gender, and imperial necropolitics, is the war economy constituted by racial capital, as epitomized by Gaza.

Violence is not a byproduct of capitalism, or what the accountants now call an “externality.” It constitutes the capitalism of capital in its never-ending “original accumulation,” once called primitive accumulation. This violence constitutes what Maurizio Lazzarato calls “war against population,” which becomes genocide when it is a “hot” war.

The occupation assumes that the society-to-come out of its genocide is what it calls Greater Israel. Outside of formal logic, the dialectic is never so simple, never so binary. Much more is happening.

Gazan artist Farah Qarmout questions: “how can art reckon with the unimaginable and therefore the unrepresentable?” Without for a moment discounting the unspeakable violence of the genocide, is there another imagination, another image imbricated in this relation of the visible and the unspeakable, that of free reality? I hope that there is and this is the account of how I got there.

Study

Since the Renaissance, mainstream Western pictorial practice imagined the artwork as a “window on the world.” Modernist painting that challenged such viewpoints was nonetheless manifestly made in the studio, often with the museum in mind. Aya Juha’s photograph of her studio in North Gaza immediately makes it clear that these condition no longer pertain in the same way.

Juha’s work is on show both in Gaza and outside. All of the artists in this biennial have had to overcome immense difficulties to make their work in the first place and then to share it. It was sent in digital form. I imagine an artist going to a piece of higher ground, in search of a signal, to send a file, probably using an eSim “located” in Egypt or elsewhere. In so doing, they made themselves into a target. Taking that kind of risk to share artwork is a different kind of “unimaginable” than the violence it so clearly depicts. It embodies the commitment to freedom, even as the Palestinian “body exists in fragments,” as Juha puts it.

Artists found ways to make work despite the absence of materials. Fatema Abu Owda lists “hibiscus, red pepper extract {and] paper from the poem In Praise of the High Shadow by Mahmoud Darwish as components of her diptych How Alone You Were and The Map of the Body (2025). These works disrupt the picture space, blend abstraction with figural drawing and center poetry as the link that enables the connection to be made between the visible and the unspeakable. It does not matter to me if other artists have done this before. It matters that Abu Owda is doing it now, in Gaza, in the midst of a genocide.

Rubble

Abu Owda’s wall text read in part:

Reading and seeing such materials, people held their bodies differently in the small Biennale pavilion than they might in a standard art gallery. There was no shuffling for space, no celebratory encounters. Faces were blank, shocked, and there were tears. These reactions responded to what I will call the “manifest content” of the video, painting and installation—the shattered buildings, the endless grey-white rubble and above all the presence, whether visibly or otherwise, of the dead and injured.

As John Berger realized long ago, rubble is many things. It expresses at once material destruction; a destruction of “temporal and spatial continuity;” and that of “words whose sense has been destroyed.” To which can now be added the effort to destroy what is seen, whether in person or in mediated form.

The work in the Bienniale both depicts the rubble and refuses its denial of meaning, even if the frame in which it might be understood has to be changed, Each individual item is, as it were, rubble becoming something else. Each forms a frame or sequence, which, when assembled by the participant in the Biennale’s space becomes a “video.” Video here is not a technical form but a relation, a means to see oneself and others in relation, in solidarity, in Nguyen’s “capacious grief.”

Displacement and Return

As if aware of this very different reality effect (to stand Barthes on his head), the artists take care to address the symbolism present in their work in the written texts collected on the Biennale website. The keyword in both registers is “displacement.” Of course, displacement is also a key “relation,” as Freud called it to interpreting dreams that has been widely used to analyze visual media.

Displacement is the goal of the occupation. Some 250,000 people have been displaced from Gaza City in the week I have been struggling with this post. Biennale artists describe displacement as a series of events: their fifth or thirteenth displacement, whether from home or some preliminary refuge.

To see Osama Husein Al Naqqa’s digital drawing The Return in this context was, then, intensely overdetermined. Drawn by hand on a phone screen as part of a series, Al Naqqa’s work involves both symbolism and documentation. It depicts the second Great March of Return in January 2025 when those who could returned to North Gaza in a great procession. The artist notes in the wall text that it “expresses a Palestinian truth—that no matter how far one is displaced, the dream of return to their land endures, even if that land is beneath the rubble.”

By means of psychic displacement, this drawing also evoked a set of complex associations for me as an anti-Zionist Jew. It visually recalled similar scenes from the Holocaust, including the forced marches towards the end of the war. That cathects all my shame and guilt for having failed that legacy, having failed to honor the memory of family members and so many others, as a second genocide unfolds, using the Holocaust as “justification,” and in my name, insofar as my name is as a Jew.

The intense black-and-white work gives Al Naqqa’s drawing a historic feel, recalling similar work in my parents’ and grandparents’ houses. The child carries a photograph, literally holding onto memory as he walks, asking questions. On this day, the news photographs taken by Eyad Baba showing yet another march South, retreating from another IDF onslaught, were equally in my mind. This “Return” was, sadly, not definitive but one in a continuing series.

Freud does all he can to contain the dream-image to the psyche, working through an interminable immanent critique. What work like Al Naqqa’s shows is that displacement—like all the psychic apparatus of condensation and overdetermination—is shaped by what Fanon called “sociogeny,” meaning simply: “Society intervenes in the development of the personality starting in childhood.” By the same token, any “disalienation” or undehumanizing must be collective, driven not by the state but by solidarity and its mutual recognitions.

Dream Work

And that takes me to where I came in, the sense that even in genocide there is an emerging free reality to be discerned. I would not have said that in the Biennale itself or afterwards, when the violence was uppermost in my mind. I could not stop thinking about the pavilion all week, going over it again and again. Then I started to dream about it.

In the dreams, I was at the Biennale but also somehow in Palestine. I was with friends. It was not safe but it was not a nightmare. To the contrary, I woke up feeling energized. It took three days of having this dream before I started to make the connection and to think that I needed to understand why this appalling genocide also opened the possibility of liberation in the abyss. And so I started to write.