This is an exhibition of contemporary art. By Palestinians. In a moment when their voices, their land, their culture and their lives are being annihilated. A time when the language and voices and freedom of those who speak about genocide, occupation, apartheid, are being confiscated. If this reality is allowed to be denied by media distortion and political indifference, or deliberately ignored out of fear, or regulated out of sight by bad faith manipulation, then our freedom of expression is lost. There has never been a time when it has been more important to call a spade a spade, to not be swayed by the euphemisms, semantic violence and double-talk that would silence a people.
Art is the first to fall and the last to die in the onslaught on freedom of expression. These artists go on, relentlessly digging, exploring their medium, delivering up new affects, new ways of seeing, new angles and dimensions of a reality that others endlessly reduce, even unto death. The Occupation knows the power of culture. This is why it targets and kills the artists and the educators. Let us not forget this when visiting this Art Exhibition in this University.
These artworks resist and reach out, through their extraordinary quality and in their great diversity, beyond their context to a universality that is being dismantled bomb by bomb, lie by lie, fear by fear. There is no substitute for their singularity.
« Il y a une affinité fondamentale entre l’œuvre d’art et l’acte de résistance » said the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. So be it. But these works… Resistance is the very matter they are made of. They do not speak. They do not try to convince us of anything. Theirs is a material struggle to make sense of an experience beyond words. They strike us and force us to think again. In one look, they cut through the mass of human discourse that blinds us. We others, we need them. We need their resistances to inspire us to our own, since we have forgotten how to resist.
www.instagram.com/resistances_expo
Nick Millett
(12/02/2025)