The Art of Grief, Violence, Death and a Genocide

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30-05-2025

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The Art of Grief, Violence, Death and a Genocide
Pariplab Chakraborty
14 minutes ago
Curated by Amit Mukhopadhyay and organised by SAHMAT, 'The Body Called Palestine' is an ongoing exhibition at Jawahar Bhawan, New Delhi. It features digital prints of Palestinian artists' works along with works from artists worldwide in solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Sliman Mansour's work at the exhibition 'The Body Called Palestine'. Photo: Pariplab Chakraborty.
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'Here, where the hills slope before the sunset and the chasm of time
near gardens whose shades have been cast aside
we do what prisoners do
we do what the jobless do
we sow hope…'
– Mahmoud Darwish, A State of Siege, 2002
Palestinian art, by existing, challenges the very foundation of Israeli-settler colonialism. Every occupation tries to destroy the idea of the people they occupy and in order to accomplish that, it inflicts violence on the occupied bodies. It tries to obliterate memories, truths and traces of genocidal violence. But can it omit the idea of the people resisting the occupation and defending their own land?
Curated by Amit Mukhopadhyay and organised by SAHMAT, 'The Body Called Palestine' is an ongoing exhibition at Jawahar Bhawan, New Delhi. It features digital prints of Palestinian artists' works along with works from artists worldwide in solidarity with the Palestinian people. Primarily, the exhibition seeks to remember. It is an attempt to challenge our 'monocular vision' of seeing and to engage with a new artistic language that stems from Palestinian artists across fields who are living under and resisting a genocidal regime.
'The Body Called Palestine' showcases works of Palestinian artists and their expressions of living under a never ending system of occupation, ethnic cleansing, everyday violence and utter dehumanisation. It witnesses alienation, loss, grief, and anger.
Malak Mattar, a young Palestinian artist, grew up in the Gaza strip witnessing occupation and military siege. She had created a series of monochrome and grayscale drawings and paintings – documenting the genocide in her homeland – during a residency programme. She later combined all of those images into this monumental grayscale painting titled 'No Words… (For Gaza)'. This work explicitly tells the horrors and devastation of occupation and a vicious cycle of displacement and ethnic cleansing of the people of Palestine.
While working on this painting she said 'It needs to be completely horrific,' 'otherwise it will not accurately reflect the genocide.'
Malak Mattar's 'No Words…(For Gaza)'. Photo: Pariplab Chakraborty.
Malak Mattar's art. Photo: Pariplab Chakraborty.
Maisara Baroud is a Palestinian artist from Gaza city. As a witness, his works evoke a sense of the unfathomable and the familiar, both. It is like a never-ending blur between the blacks and whites, like a nauseating fever – akin to the experience of a relentless cycle of atrocities.
'He consistently highlights topics such as war, immigration, political prisoners, illegal arrests, and occupation. Baroud's works reflect dramatic and tragic scenes, dominated by grief, death, violence, peace, hope, and freedom. His art mirrors how life is intertwined with a fresh, continuous scent of death that never seems to fade.' the artist's statement reads.
Maisara Baroud's 'The Artistic Diary of Maisara Baroud'. Photo: Pariplab Chakraborty.
The artworks show resilient acts of recording, embedded in personal and political experiences, ensuring that the grand sweep of historical injustice and the records of deafening silence from those in power are not erased.
Digital prints of noted Palestinian artist and art historian Vera Tamari's works are also on display in the exhibition. Vera was only three years old during the first Nakba in 1948. She grew up seeing a perpetual state of occupation, war and violence inflicted upon the Palestinian lives. Her vast body of ceramic, sculpture and installation works intensively talk about seeing the Palestinian reality up front and with its innumerable layers of memories, the undaunting resilience Palestinian identity and its cultural heritage.
Vera Tamari's 'Palestinian Women at Work' (ceramic relief). Photo: Pariplab Chakraborty.
The exhibition also featured an excerpt of a presentation by Vera Tamari along with the digital prints of her works. Presented originally in a conference titled 'Art and War', organised by the Goethe Institute in Ramallah, in November 2004, it goes like this:
Going for a Ride?
(Installation, 2002)
Cars are powerful icons in our society. Other than being urban household commodities, cars have become a metaphor of daily life. These inanimate objects even carry an emotional significance for most people. Not for me; I never owned a car nor learnt to drive one, but seeing my friend Liza's Volkswagen Beetle as I peeked from behind the shutters of my window one morning made me shudder.
That quaint red car in which we often rode, was visibly smashed. It was lying on its hood wheels up, almost like a dead real beetle.
In Going for a Ride? those inanimate objects, symbols of well-being, status, and freedom have in an act of vindictive violence, perpetrated by the Israeli military tanks in the 2002 invasion of Ramallah, taken on a new reality. They metamorphosed from once practical objects to become subjects of vengeful voodooism. Do we hurt the Palestinians more by destroying their cherished personal belongings?
My idea in making this installation was not to merely to fashion junk as an art form or an anti-gesture as advocated by Nouveau Realiste or Dada artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Cesare in their crashed car compositions. Both artists challenged the conventional notion of art as an aesthetic exercise. I simply wanted to make a statement about how a mundane logical reality becomes totally illogical through the violence of the war machine. It is hard to see my installation of smashed cars as not carrying a political meaning. Seven hundred private and public cars were smashed in the military incursion of Ramallah alone. I wanted to give those cars a voice – an ironic reflection on the unnecessary nature of violence whose authors were the Israeli occupation forces. This act of destruction became like action art disturbing the status quo of matters.
The soldiers in this case have become the artist creators.
The soldiers the viewers.
The soldiers as re-creators.
The installation piece kept changing.
It had a new energy each time – more violent than the previous one.
I was merely the curator.
Basma Al Sharif's work. Photo: Pariplab Chakraborty.
Basma Alsharif is an artist and filmmaker of Palestine heritage. A series of Basma's six photographs are on display in this exhibition. Her works explore the cyclical political histories and confront the 'legacy of colonisation with satire, doubt and hope'.
SAHMAT's continued solidarity with the Palestinian people finds a vivid expression in this exhibition, where, as the curator articulates 'the response to the Palestine question across the world has become a unifying force that creates new solidarities as an antidote to the atomising effects of a military-industrial complex'.
'The Body Called Palestine' aims to remember the history and presence of Israeli settler colonialism and its genocidal military offence as it is. This is valuable at a time when the larger mediascape peddles false narratives without any accountability and often erects a smokescreen of half-truths and lies, that help those in power obfuscate historical facts and cultivate public apathy.
Aban Raza, a Delhi-based artist who also co-curated an art exhibition in solidarity with Palestine last year titled 'Fida-e-Filistine' and organised by SAHMAT, says, 'This exhibition is a testament to artists' solidarity from around the world with the Palestinian struggle and our collective resistance, despite all odds and silencing.'
Labani Jangi's 'Even after a genocide, the rising moon doesn't burn our eyes'. Photo: Pariplab Chakraborty.
This watercolour painting by artist and scholar Labani Jangi from Nadia, West Bengal, explores the difference in her perception of the moon between her childhood and the present, where there's a full scale massacre of Palestinian lives happening in every passing day.
'The moon that once used to bring Eid, festivals or fantastic stories from Naani now stands still – in silence like a representative of those who can afford to dwell in apathy. Those who remain silent even after seeing a genocide in front of their eyes – drenched in the propagandas of fascist regimes,' says Labani.
The exhibition is on view until May 31, from 9.30 am to 7 pm at Jawahar Bhawan, New Delhi.
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