The Israeli military’s indiscriminate strikes on the Gaza Strip, which have killed over 22,000 people since Hamas’s October 7 attack, have mobilized people in all corners of the world. Protests, boycotts, disruptions, and other actions have emerged internationally, prompting a deluge of visual messaging in solidarity with and advocacy for Palestinian liberation. While images alone can’t put a stop to the atrocities that are unfolding on a daily basis, art is critical in raising awareness, supplementing and documenting sociopolitical movements, and providing people with multiple modes of communicating their resistance against systems of abuse.
Spending her childhood between Palestine and St. Louis, Missouri, Palestinian-American artist Saj Issa has blended Arab cultural references with Western commercial symbolism through her work to convey a hybridized identity born from displacement and colonial hierarchies. In the following painting, however, Issa pointedly asks her audience: “Have You Been to Palestine?” (2023).
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“I wanted to create a work that evokes the feeling of prison doors opening in on liberation abandoned on the floor, waiting to be discovered,” Issa told Hyperallergic. When she shared the painting on Instagram, the artist expressed that she had witnessed a “superficial social media movement become a trend across Hollywood, Western media, and the world’s most powerful figures, completely flattening the course of a 75-year long process of colonization to a single tragic event.”
“The watermelon Palestinians have been forced to be married to for 75 years is long gone rotten,” Issa wrote, recounting how the fruit became the symbol for Palestinian resistance when Israel banned the flag of Palestine in the Gaza Strip and West Bank after seizing control of the territories in 1967. “I’m ready to taste a new watermelon.”
Ridikkuluz, a queer Jordanian-American artist living and working in New York, models the iconic Statue of Liberty after Handala, a symbolic and iconic character developed by Palestinian political cartoonist Naji al-Ali portraying a 10-year-old refugee with his back turned to the viewer. Al-Ali was only 10 years old when he was forced to leave Palestine, and specified that Handala is frozen in time and will only turn around and face the world once Palestinians are able to return to their homeland.
“The pacifist gesture of putting your hands behind your back as your world blows up in flames, is the Palestinian resistance personified,” Ridikkuluz told Hyperallergic in an email. “In this specific take, I put the Statue of Liberty, which symbolizes freedom, in a keffiyeh and posed like ‘Handala’ with her hands behind her back and her flame dimmed to have a bigger conversation. Existence is the best resistance after all.”
Also moved by the symbols of Palestinian resistance, Brooklyn-based artist Emilia W. Olsen reflected on a quote from Yazen al-Qum, a pigeon fancier from East Jerusalem who was featured in the Washington Post in 2017.
“The pigeons make me feel free,” al-Qum told the publication from his rooftop in the Shuafat refugee camp. “Through their eyes I go everywhere, I see everything. You know the walls, the places I cannot go? There’s no wall for the birds. They’re above all this.”
Olsen shared that there is a pigeon rearer near her place in Brooklyn, too. “On nice days at sunset he rallies his birds to fly in circles above our neighborhood with a large white flag,” she told Hyperallergic. “After October 7, I kept thinking of that quote, watching these local birds soar, while also watching the barrage of unimaginable horrors coming out of Gaza. Like many artists I process through making, and so came the pigeons, and the necessary cues of resistance: Palestinian poppies, the olive branch.”
“Such a small thing — to paint a little something and post it on social media,” Olsen continued. “I thought about the latter more than I would like to admit, in the midst of many reports of artists facing censorship and de-platforming for similar viewpoints or even just calling for a cease-fire. But what is all that in comparison to what the Palestinian people are facing, what they have been experiencing for decades? The more of us who speak out, in whichever way possible, the better possibility there is of another, kinder world.”
For Peter Cizmadia, a multidisciplinary artist currently situated in Utah, art was an outlet for processing the Israeli military attacks in Gaza following October 7, especially as his son was born earlier that same month.
“We spent October in and out of doctor offices in those frantic few weeks of my son’s early life,” Cizmadia said in an email to Hyperallergic. “It was very hard to square the care and consideration we received with the scenes of horror and devastation faced by parents just like us, as well as healthcare workers dedicated to preserving life. So in free moments on late nights, I got to work on an image that’s always resonated with me: unbuilding walls, breaking fences, and demolishing barriers.”
Cizmadia started selling his linocut print editions to raise money for the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund to turn “effort and empathy and pain into something tangible and useful.”
“If we all flex our muscles in our small circles to carry some of the load, maybe we can inspire others to do it too, and as that echoes, we can move the world,” he continued. “It’s the only way.”
Jess MacCormack, an artist and instructor at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, British Columbia, incorporates the mutable forms of generative artificial intelligence as a visualization of trauma-induced dissociation in their videography. In a neo-surrealist digital scape, MacCormack generated “part-human, part-watermelon characters” rippling and pulsing in a desert environment while other figures hold up slices of the symbolic fruit to the viewer as slowed-down traditional Palestinian music plays with the sound of bombs dropping and gunfire.
“As many, I have been deeply disturbed by the ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people and the dehumanizing propaganda and support of Israel by Western governments and media,” MacCormack explained to Hyperallergic via email. “For those of us paying attention, our social media feeds are full of some of the worst horrors every day. We try to bridge the reality of incredibly unjust and brutal human suffering imposed on so many people — including children — through protests and phone calls to our politicians, but the bombardment continues. I made this work in solidarity, from the river to the sea …”
Activist and artist Sue Coe is no stranger to social protest, documenting history, and political commentary through illustration as demonstrated by her decades-long career. Known for targeting inequalities from apartheid states and the prison-industrial complex to animal cruelty and war crimes, Coe has been predictably vocal about her solidarity with Palestinians through her practice and social media presence.
In “Starving to Death – Ceasefire!” (2023), Coe characteristically depicts humans and animals suffering alike as just skin and bones, commenting on the deadly impact of increasingly sparse basic resources for Gaza’s civilians on top of the destruction of their homes and killings of loved ones.
In “U.N. Ceasefire” (2023), Coe renders the United Nations Security Council’s block of a demand for a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza based on a single veto from the United States’s representing party. A Palestinian mother holds the body of her murdered child in the center of the roundtable meeting, ignored by the group of 12 represented nations while Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica” (1937) spans the background wall.
Quickly but confidently drawn in graphite on paper, Coe’s high-contrast, monochromatic illustrations speak to the immediacy of the crisis at large. “A pencil is cheap and can be carried anywhere, behind an ear, along with a scrap of paper,” the illustrator reminds us on her website. “Art can happen, function as visual journalism, a record. I draw every day. If you stand on any street corner for twelve hours making a drawing every ten minutes you are recording social and political life in the way of a witness.”
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Brooklyn-based artist Nadav Schwartzman, who describes himself as an “anti-Zionist Jew” from an “extremely Zionist household,” publicly renounced his Israeli citizenship last November and expressed his decision through both text and visual means.
“As an artist, I recognize the importance of icons as well as language as a means to convey power, and to spark hope,” Schwartzman wrote in a passionate Instagram caption accompanying his recent painting, “Fire” (2023). “This genocidal campaign Israel is taking and the response of those in power in the US to establish anti-zionism as antisemitism makes it clear what a death grip Zionism has on Judaism. That it puts Jews worldwide in danger. That the Israeli flag is waved at far-right rallies makes it clear this has become a symbol for hate.”
“How else do you describe tattooing it on a Palestinian refugee’s face?” Schwartzman continued, referring to a news story from August 2023 alleging that Israeli police blind-folded, beat, and branded a Palestinian refugee from Shuafat camp with the Star of David. “Or scarring the ground in Gaza with it?”
“I wanted to create an image that I knew I could make without being marked as antisemitic,” Schwartzman explained to Hyperallergic via email, saying he decided to be very clear and direct by painting a burning Israeli flag. “To leverage my position to give people an image to rally behind.”
For World AIDS Day on December 1, 2023, Shawn Escarciga remixed the inverted pink triangle that was once used to identify and persecute gay men in Nazi-era Germany, which had been reclaimed in the ’70s as a symbol of LGBTQ+ pride and AIDS crisis activism by the Silence = Death Project and AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), to draw attention to the US financial support for the Israeli military response in Gaza. In conjunction with Escarciga and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), ACT UP echoed its call from decades past: “Fight AIDS, not Arabs!“
In response to the House proposal to slash funding for HIV/AIDS treatments, research, and prevention programs in the US coupled with the $14 billion aid package to Israel, JVP and ACT UP say: “FUND HEALTHCARE, NOT WARFARE! PERMANENT CEASEFIRE NOW!”
Source: Hyperallergic.com