What went down at London’s first Gaza Biennale

On Tuesday night (January 15), hundreds of people gathered outside the ICA in London for the first staging of the Gaza Biennale, a transnational art project bringing together the work of over 60 Palestinian artists. 

The Biennale was timed to coincide with the private launch of New Contemporaries, an annual exhibition which has for decades been held at the ICA, this year showcasing 35 artists selected via an open call. Since 2001, New Contemporaries has been sponsored by Bloomberg Philanthropies, an organisation accused of facilitating illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. As well as being a kind of guerrilla art show, this week’s Biennale was a protest against the ICA, its ties with Bloomberg and, more broadly, the complicity of British cultural institutions in the oppression of the Palestinian people.

When I arrived at the ICA, shortly after 6pm, the queue to enter the New Contemporaries viewing was already snaking a hundred metres alongside the side of the building. The protestors were gathered opposite the entrance, with a group at the front holding an enormous red banner reading “YOU ARE COMPLICIT”. But the attitude of the Gaza Biennale contingent towards the attendees was not hostile or accusatory: throughout the first couple of hours, alongside chants accusing the ICA of art-washing genocide and speeches detailing the precise nature of Bloomberg’s activities in the occupied West Bank, they implored the people in the queue to defect to the other side, chanting “Join us! Join us! Join us!” The queuers, for their part, looked a little bashful and sheepish (there was none of the haughty defensiveness you sometimes see from people who are, at least to some extent, themselves being protested). I didn’t witness it myself, but I was told that quite a few of them did cross over to the protest before making it to the entrance.

I tried to speak to some of the queuers to find out what they thought about the protest and whether they were even aware of what it was about. One young artist, who asked not to be named, said he was planning to join the protest after he’d seen the exhibition. “I do feel a bit conflicted about going inside, but if it’s a bit of a contradiction then I can live with that. I think the ICA is an amazing institution, but I do support the protest in demanding it cut ties with Bloomberg.” Everyone else in the queue I approached politely declined to speak, although one woman said she might be up for it after she figured out what was going on.

Although it happened without any fanfare, about an hour later there was a ripple of energy through the crowd as a large group of the artists featured in the exhibition walked out of the building to join the protest, leading a number of attendees outside with them. Immediately prior, they had read a statement of solidarity inside the gallery, expressing their support for the Gaza Biennale and echoing the group’s demands for the ICA to cut ties with Bloomberg, to stop banking with Barclays and to commit to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Of the 35 artists featured in the show, 28 signed this statement.

“We mainly wanted to take our cues from the organisers and use the attention and the leverage of the show to cede as much space to them as possible,” Fi Isidore, one of the artists involved in organising the walk-out, tells Dazed. Roo Dhissou, another of the artists, has supported the Palestine movement for a long time, but a 2022 experience at the Documenta art festival in Germany led to her becoming more vocal on the issue. “A lot of my friends were targeted by pro-Israel curators and funders after showing work which supported Palestine. That’s when I realised that people were really being censored.” The repression of Palestine solidarity in the art world has become even more pervasive since October 7, both in Europe and the US: a study published last week found that American museum directors face "considerable pressure" not to exhibit the work of Palestinian artists.

 Once Roo found out about the Gaza Biennale, she and a few other artists contacted the organisers and asked how they could show their support.“We’re trying to show cultural and arts organisations that if they become part of the boycott, divest and sanctions movement, then we can work together towards a cultural society that isn't washing out genocide," she says. "It was important for us to show that New Contemporaries could be possible without these kinds of backings.”

A spokesperson for the ICA told Dazed that the institution respects the right to protest, but believes that this particular action was “misguided” given “much of the information they relied on regarding the ICA’s position was factually untrue”. For example, the spokerserson pointed out, the ICA has not received direct funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies since 2020 (although they did not dispute that the New Contempories exhibition was sponsored by Bloomberg.) A spokesperson for New Contemporaries told Dazed that it is fully supportive of the artists’ right to protest and show solidarity with the Gaza Biennale. "Our annual exhibition is no longer referred to as Bloomberg New Contemporaries – we are New Contemporaries. Bloomberg are continuing to support New Contemporaries as an organisation,” they explained. “The reality of the arts funding landscape in the UK means that we continue to be reliant on contributions from sponsors and supporters in order to stay operational.” 

After the artists staged their walk-out, the event moved onto the next stage: the Gaza Biennale exhibition. The crowd moved from the entrance to the side of the building, where each piece was projected onto the wall with a short introduction. Seeing this work was a solemn experience, but it was impossible not to be impressed by the ingenuity and resourcefulness of artists in Gaza, many of whom have been forced to change their practice based on whatever tools and materials happen to be available. After being displaced from his home city of Rafah, sculptor Khaled Hussein (خالد حسين) began creating a makeshift clay from mud and working with that – the resulting work, “I Miss You Deeply”,  is starkly beautiful. Depicting a meagre food ration, “Loaf of Bread”, a photograph by Ahmed Muhanna (أحمد مهنا), is a playful spin on Maurizio Cattelan’s infamous taped banana, a concept rendered even more absurd amid a context of famine.

Several of the works featured deal directly with scenes of destruction and the experience of living through the war, such as “Gaza 2024” by Diana Alhosary (ديانا الحصري), which depicts a destroyed urban street;  “Displacement to the Beach”, a chalk pastel drawing in hazy blues and greens by Yara Zuhod (يارا زهد), and the nightmarish, monochromatic landscape of Motaz Naim’s (معتز نعيم)  “Gaza and its Cities”. Others are more opaque but no less haunting for their ambiguity, like Alaa Al Shawa’s (آلاء الشوا)  watercolour painting, “Imitating the Masks”.

“We believe it’s not only important to protest complicity but also to support the production of artistic and cultural work, especially in the face of a genocide,” Jeanine, a media rep for the Palestinian Youth Movement, tells Dazed. “A critical part of a genocide is cultural and artistic erasure, so part of our struggle and part of our resistance is also insisting on the everyday aspects of life, insisting on things like arts and culture in the face of the erasure of our people.”