Pearls and Irritations

Palestinian liberation movements on this continent are intertwined with Blak liberation and resistance movements for restorative land justice around the world. To organise for Palestinian liberation, to organise for First Nations liberation on this continent and globally, is to call for a drastic restructuring of settler identity and cultural awareness of the role of settler colonialism and genocide in the current world order.

Writings from the ANU Gaza Solidarity Encampment – Part 6

This is Part Six of a six-part series of articles from the ANU Gaza Solidarity Encampment. Apart from the Introduction by Emeritus Professor Tamara Jacka, all articles are written by student members of the encampment. To protect the authors against identification, we have kept them anonymous.

Art and popular resistance: truth telling from ANU to Gaza to Sudan

I am a student at the Australian National University (ANU). I am writing from tents, camp chairs and hammocks at the ANU Gaza Solidarity Encampment, which has stood for more than 70 days on unceded Ngunnawal and Ngambri country. I acknowledge Elders past, present and emerging, and express my solidarity with First Nations mobs organising for land justice and liberation. Palestinian liberation movements on this continent are intertwined with Blak liberation and resistance movements for restorative land justice around the world. To organise for Palestinian liberation, to organise for First Nations liberation on this continent and globally, is to call for a drastic restructuring of settler identity and cultural awareness of the role of settler colonialism and genocide in the current world order.

Art plays a crucial role in popular resistance. Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh, who visited the ANU encampment in May, describes popular resistance in terms of coalition and collective; diverse groups of people working through diverse means in common struggle. In popular resistance, art increases our capacity for collective risk, emboldens the movement, and helps us realise the possibility of new worlds. Art, including music, poetry and painting, connects us across time and space. As artists, we organise to disrupt violent colonial systems and practise restorative justice through truth-telling and world-making (Gwendolyn).

Public art is non-violent resistance, but it is increasingly criminalised on this continent and across the world (Landry, 2019). Military rhetoric connects public art to urban disorder and anxieties around instability and insecurity.

Artwork in the Deir al-Balah refugee camp; part of an exhibition held about children’s loss in the Gaza strip, June 2023. Source: Xinhua.

Writing on the side of a tent in Gaza strip, 2024.

Date and source unknown.

Banner reads “Dhawura nguna, dhawura Ngunnawal. Kambri is the ancient meeting place. Gaza Solidarity Encampment, ALBANESE + ANU CUT TIES WITH APArTHEID ISRAEL. From Aboriginal Land to Palestine Decolonise Now.” Kambri Lawns, 03 May 2024. This banner was stolen from an exhibition at the ANU school of art and design gallery in June.

On June 12, 2024, a pro-Palestine exhibition at the ANU school of art and design was vandalised and several works of art were damaged or stolen. This art included work created for the Gaza solidarity encampment, and carrying messages of solidarity, anti-war and decolonisation. ANU has responded by refusing to offer the organisers a second exhibition and decommission the exhibition space based on ‘safety concerns.’ So, no student artists can exhibit there in future. This is part of a growing trend, which also includes arts and humanities funding and course cuts, as the spaces for creative expression and cultural critique in educational institutions are systematically reduced by the state.

We feel deep distress over the loss of our art and student gallery space. However, this cannot be compared to the distress we feel over our university’s complicity in the ongoing Palestinian genocide. It does not compare to the loss of art and culture in the Israeli Occupying Force (IOF) bombing of Gaza.

Gaza’s last contemporary arts centre, Shababek (‘window’ in Arabic) was bombed by the IOF in April, destroying over 30 years of local artists’ work (Hyperallergic).

You can visit the digital archive and explore in 3D archives of exhibitions that Shababek gallery once held, exploring themes of land, loss, amputation and more, here: Shababek.

Artists in Gaza continue to hold community events with children, paint on the rubble of their homes, and practice culture and document their lives through artistic resistance.

Basel El Maqosui, a founder of Shababek, hosting art sessions with displaced children in Gaza strip, May 2024.

Source: The Art Newspaper.

Artistic resistance and truth telling was also instrumental in the successful Sudanese popular revolution in 2019. Young artists played an instrumental role in successfully overthrowing the government in response to corruption and the tripling price of bread. There was an artistic explosion of murals, flyers and chants created, capturing and amplifying the voices of ordinary people and galvanising the revolution. People were subject to intense military repression and many hundreds of protesters were shot and killed. Muralist Assil Diab recounted how the community formed blockades with their bodies against armed police while she painted martyrs of the uprising.

Assil Diab painting a mural to honour Mahjoub el-Taj, who was martyred in during the 2019 Sudanese revolution.

Source: Dawn

Sudan currently faces the greatest hunger and displacement crisis in the world as military groups fight for power with heavy civilian casualties, inflamed by the imposition of western colonialism, past and present. Social media blackouts and ongoing media censorship, like those seen in Gaza, prevent the message of artists and common people in Sudan from reaching us in the West. But still, we find ways through global community to find each other, through archives and social media. We bear witness to each other’s grief and resistance.

Students and artists in Gaza and the global south must be included in our communications. Through art, we connect to each other through universal visual languages, and we shape the future through our shared creativity.

We will not be intimidated into silence.

For more on this topic, P&I recommends:

Writings from the ANU Gaza Solidarity Encampment

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