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Written by Richard Andrew Cahill. This article was first published in the Jerusalem Quarterly in the Summer 2009 issue. It is republished with permission.

Written by Shahd Abusalama. Excerpt from the book “Gaza on Screen”. Copyright Duke University Press, 2023.

This analysis paper explores a paradigm shift that alQaws has been exploring over the past decade of its grassroots community organizing, which centers the experiences of queer Palestinians.

Not Gay as in Happy but Queer as in Free Palestine is a statement that first appeared on placards in Palestinian queer solidarity marches around the globe, and later visualised by artist and designer Marwan Kaabour during Pride Month in 2021.

The Palestinian village of Tantura located south of Haifa along the Mediterranean, was occupied by Israeli forces 75 years ago, on 22-23 May 1948.

The short experimental video examines the network of apparatuses that Israel used to orchestrate its emergence.

Featuring in Sleeping with a Vengeance, Dreaming of a Life, curated by Ruth Noack, Yellow Brick, Athens; Lítost, Prague; Institute for Provocation, Beijing; Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart; and in Transcultural Emancipation, FLUC, Vienna.

“Generation after Generation” is a series of screen prints that explores the visual language of political posters from the 1960s and 1970s, focusing on the influence of Palestinian revolutionaries like Leila Khaled. Khaled’s gender and her involvement in a plane hijacking captured international attention, challenging Western perceptions of Arab women as docile and oppressed.

The films of Basma al-Sharif often contain landscapes, cityscapes, and social environments that map out the fractured psychogeography of the Palestinian diaspora. She represents her own experience, as a drifting subject between the Middle East, Europe, and the US, and the resulting understanding of a shattered world that taps into a relatable experience of wanderers.

The centrepiece of Emily Jacir’s Notes for a Cannon (2016), created for the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) in Dublin, is a site-specific sound work at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham Clock Tower and a multimedia installation. Inside IMMA an exploded array of images, documents, sculptures, video, and objects results in an interconnected constellation of historical and social struggles in two distinct geographies for national liberation against British occupations.

In 2020, during the Covid pandemic lockdown and in the midst of Trump’s presidency, the Black Lives Matter movement erupted across the United States. Edgar Heap of Birds forms part of the Cheyenne and Arapaho nations. Throughout his career he has used his art to bring visibility and justice to the colonial crimes against his people imparted by the settler-colonial project of England and the United States.

Crack in the Mosaic: Occupation and Catastrophe (1917-1948)