Painting for Palestine

A powerful exhibition brings together artworks of over 70 artists from across the world in Delhi in solidarity with Palestine's struggle for freedom, identity, and survival

- 

THE war in Gaza is being live-streamed, arriving in waves of brutal imagerybombings, bloodied bodies, and the unfathomable grief of displacement and loss. In a world saturated with such visual violence, how does one make and, more importantly, witness art? The exhibition 'The Body Called Palestine,' on view at Jawahar Bhawan and organised by the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (SAHMAT), is a step towards forging artistic and civic solidarities "against the unprecedented war unleashed on Palestine by Israel", says its curator Amit Mukhopadhyay.

The attempt is to "bring the Arab world back into our cultural imagination", at a time of its near-disappearance in mainstream art and political discourse.

The show assembles a powerful collective voice of over 70 artists from Palestine, India, and across the world in solidarity with Palestine's struggle for freedom, identity, and survival. It sets the tone for a new vocabulary of resistance through the aesthetics of viewing artistic production as protest in the face of annihilation.

As it is currently impossible to transport artwork out of Gaza, and many Palestinian artists today are part of the diaspora, scattered over the world, all of the pieces in the show have been facilitated through digital prints. In that sense, The 'Body Called Palestine' reclaims memory and testimony as urgent.

Memory, land, resistance