This is not a normal review. The ongoing genocide in Gaza makes it impossible to consider contemporary art in any regular sense. How to assess aesthetics, impact, concepts, political positions, and the histories upon which art is produced when, as of this writing, Israel is in the midst of its invasion of Rafah, trapping more than one million people in a war zone, continuing to bomb hospitals, refugee camps, basic infrastructure, and producing widespread conditions of famine? It takes a lot of conceptual dissociation to consider a Biennale exhibition titled “Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere” on its own terms when Palestinians are being dehumanized, treated as “foreign,” othered, and killed in their own homes.

As an art writer, I want to always remember that we learn from artists first, that artists are our teachers. I never want to become jaded or think of art as secondary. I want art that reminds us of shared experiences, shared humanity, art that is more powerful than capital, that is never reducible to luxury. I want art that shows us how, at its very core, making art is what it means to be human. Palestinian artists, poets, writers, and their allies show us how to encourage critique alongside solidarity, how to imagine relationships, lives, and histories through aesthetics, how to build meaningful connections despite systems designed to isolate us. What follows is a brief survey of projects in Venice that offer connection and a sense of urgency in thinking through the role of art, even alongside military occupation.

“South West Bank – Landworks, Collective Action and Sound” is the single official collateral exhibition of the Biennale to focus on art from Palestine. It gathers 20 Palestinian and allied artists and collectives in a small space to present what the title describes: land-based, sonic, and social-activist artworks from the southern West Bank. Curated by Jonathan Turner, the exhibition includes a mix of practices from collaborators of Artists + Allies x Hebron and Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research in Bethlehem: Samer Barbari, Adam Broomberg, Duncan Campbell, Rafael González, Isabella Hammad, Shayma Hamad, Chris Harding, Baha Hilo, Emily Jacir, Sebastián Jatz Rawicz, Benjamin Lind, Jumana Manna, Michael Rakowitz, Mohammad Saleh, Vivien Sansour, Andrea de Siena, Dima Srouji, and other participants. Together their works make a powerful claim for how histories of cultivation, the tending and caring for and of the land, are practices of homemaking deeply rooted in Palestine. Adam Broomberg and Rafael González’s large-scale black-and-white photographs, Anchor in the landscape (2022), sensitively show the gnarled limbs of hundred-and thousand-year-old olive trees, twisting ever outward to accommodate new growth, which become symbolic portraits of life as both precarious and grounded. Baha Hilo’s olive oil containers, PRESERVE (2022–2024), are the result of the first harvest of Dar Jacir’s olive terraces, which are being repaired through companion planting and soil regeneration. Sari Khoury’s Grapes of Wrath (2021) is a minimalist arrangement of wine bottles containing wine produced from grape varietals indigenous to Palestine, inspired by the long history of viticulture in the region around Bethlehem—where the domestication of wild grapes by Natufian civilizations began in the seventh to eighth millennia BCE. Among so many powerful works, Shayma Hamad’s dough-kneading installation (Dough ball, 2024) and publication on bread as a sustaining component of death rituals (The Distance of Death from my Hands to my Mouth, 2023) and Mohammad Saleh’s Ardawa (2022–ongoing), video excerpts documenting the bioremediation of an urban farm burned by the Israeli army in 2021, both stand out as demonstrations of the beauty in connecting people to the land and each other.

At Fondazione In Between Art Film, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s Until we became fire and fire us (2023–ongoing) is an emotionally affecting multiscreen and multimedia installation that takes the land and life of Palestine as its locus. Although part of the group exhibition “Nebula,” it functions very much as a solo presentation, spanning six rooms that increase with visual and sonic intensity as one moves through. The first rooms are quieter, with a series of monolithic steel-panel sculptures presenting images and short notes, almost desktop-like, alongside drawings of Jerusalem created by Abou-Rahme’s father in the ’70s and ’80s. In his drawings, lone figures are shown against cityscapes, and the inverted use of white on black produces a visual effect akin to photographic negatives. As focal points amid more abstract hanging textiles and floods of pink light, the drawings suggest a personal form of historical documentation and offer a moving gesture of connection between two generations of artists. The sonic components are louder and the visual projections all-encompassing in subsequent rooms, producing a non-linear narration that travels and dances and flickers, flame-like, through accounts of indigenous plants, cactuses, ancient stones, song and protest, fire and regeneration—all emblematic of the stamina and resistance of life in Palestine. The effect induces an amnesiac’s memory: something is here that can’t be held on to, as though the end and the beginning are the same. The phrase “THOSE WHO CHANT DO NOT DIE” is a singular impression among many powerful onscreen phrases, an incantation that protest is never in vain.

Of all the projects in Venice, what stayed with me most was the open-mic poetry readings at the Freedom Boat, which was docked alongside the Giardini vaporetto stop from April 18 to 19 and organized by Artists Against Apartheid, Bidoun, Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG), and Kamel Lazaar Foundation. Visitors could listen or sign up to read from Gaza Reader Vol. 1: Poetry, a specially compiled chapbook that features writing by Palestinian poets, journalists, and at least three recently martyred writers. Maritime flags designed by artists Nicole Eisenman and Rosalind Nashashibi—one with the Palestine flag and the other with the keffiyeh pattern painted over the civic flags of Venice—framed the speakers. With the late afternoon light reflecting off the sea’s surface, and the readers’ voices mixing with the sounds of gulls caught in the wind overhead, the overwhelming power of words to articulate experience in all its horror and beauty, trauma and joy, pain and strength, was transformative. To be connected through poetry did not act as performance but solace.

“Now is the time for art and poetry. For art that rejects the logic of prevailing power. For poetry that resists the totalizing narratives that fuel the killing machines of the perpetrator. Art is inherently political— in its message, production, and presentation. It engages with society, assuming a role either in complicity or resistance.” This short excerpt is from “WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF ART? A manifesto against the state of the world,” a widely distributed poster that functioned as part of a de facto Palestinian Pavilion. To keep thinking about what art does, even in the face of genocide, is to continue to follow the artists who are leading us, in art and in poetry, in words and images, through ideas that can’t be shot down, buried, ignored, bought, or owned. The last line reads: “Palestine is the world in its future tense.” There is no room for complicity in such a world.