Images Festival | The Gaza Biennale T’karonto Pavilion: Witnessing Sumud, Closing Reception and Magazine Launch

In April 2024, artists from Gaza began to gather together under a single project to find ways to utilize art to resist this genocide. Many artists in Gaza have been working throughout this war, defying all challenges, creating works that remind us that art is essential to life and our survival as a species. A collective project has emerged into a global art event: the Gaza Biennale.

The Gaza Biennale is a collective event, a growing network, and perhaps a movement. While war has scattered and displaced our people, the biennale gathers over 40 artists on a single platform, uniting their voices. Emerging from deep roots, this Biennale extends an open invitation to local and international institutions to host and produce these exhibitions and to work with us as partners. We offer a unique opportunity to art institutions to exhibit invaluable works that reflect the need for creativity in the darkest of times.

Join us for an evening that brings together art, scholarship, and collective action, from 4:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m., for the closing of The Gaza Biennale T'karonto Pavilion: Witnessing Sumud, at A Space.

This closing event marks the launch of Gatherings' double issue, "Palestine and Campus Movements: Sites of Transnational Feminist Solidarities," with readings and reflections from contributors whose work spans feminist resistance, collective care, and the global campus movements demanding justice for Palestine. The Palestinian Youth Movement choir performs, and the evening features a panel discussion bringing together the issue's editors, creators from Stitched!, Living with Drones, a live journalism show that documents the realities of drone warfare in Gaza, and artists and writers from the issue. Together, these voices refuse the separation of art, scholarship, and activism.

For more detailed information on the Gaza Biennale and on the closing event please visit: https://gazabiennale.org/ and https://aspacegallery.org/

Featuring Alaa Abu Saif, Alaà Al Shawa, Liza Madi, Mosaab Abusal & Motaz Naim.

The Gaza Biennale T’karonto Pavilion: Witnessing Sumud, Closing Reception and Magazine Launch is co-presented by Images Festival.

Images Festival operates on land stolen from the Anishinaabe, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, the Huron-Wendat, and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. Tkáron:to is currently home to diverse Indigenous and Métis peoples as well as people who settle on this land. As part of Treaty 13 and the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Covenant, we acknowledge that we all eat from the same bowl and spoon, and must take only what we need, ensuring resources are available for all.

As art workers, artists, and curators, we see the process of untangling ourselves from settler complicity as internal, structural, and ongoing. It is not something to be taken lightly. The inclusion of Indigenous artists and curators into our program is just the first step of necessary and deeper change. Extending from our organizational accountability work, we strive to not only undo forms of complicity, but also actively create an environment and infrastructure that can support Indigenous peoples who work with us.

Images expresses our solidarity with Indigenous people on Turtle Island and globally. We are committed to continuing to learn, critique, and challenge the settler colonial structures we are complicit in.