Gaza at the Venice Biennale: Where language falls short, threads take over

As a journalist, my craft is storytelling, using words as my primary tools to navigate and articulate the complexities of events. Yet, when confronting the genocide in Gaza, my birthplace, the very medium I rely on feels profoundly insufficient. Language falters when faced with the sheer magnitude of devastation and suffering.

The memory of a bulldozer burying 111 unidentified bodies in bright blue bags, a fleeting image on social media, haunts me. The New York Times headline, "More Than 100 Bodies Are Delivered to a Mass Grave in Southern Gaza," while factual, omits the perpetrator and, more importantly, fails to convey the true horror of the event. Every attempt to encapsulate Israel's actions in Gaza through words feels reductive, unable to contain the vastness, the ongoing nature, and the lethal reality of the situation.

“

There is a limit to what words can say. At a certain point, the instinct to describe, to explain and to make sense of what has unfolded begins to break down under the sheer scale of devastation and pain.

This profound inadequacy of language is precisely what the Gaza Genocide Tapestry seeks to address. Co-curated by myself, this art project will be showcased at the Venice Biennale. It unites Palestinian women from occupied Palestine, Lebanon, and Jordan, who are documenting Gaza's destruction in real-time through their most intimate medium: needle and thread.

“

Omission of the perpetrator aside, could that possibly capture the magnitude of such an event?

Through 100 embroidered panels, each meticulously crafted with 55,000 stitches, these women are creating a powerful testament. This tapestry is a refusal to let the world forget the atrocities committed and the victims. Each panel narrates a fragment of the unfolding tragedy – a journalist mourning his child, starving children at a soup kitchen, a child witnessing the destruction of her world. While some images, like Khalid Nabhan's embrace of his dead granddaughter or Dr. Hussam Abu Safia's final moments, briefly captured global attention, most images from Gaza pass by, unnamed and unacknowledged.

The act of embroidery itself is a declaration that something is worthy of sustained effort, of hours, days, and weeks of labor. It is an assertion that these stories, these lives, are not lost amidst the overwhelming deluge of fleeting images. The tapestry stands as a powerful counter-narrative, using a medium that demands time, care, and intention to ensure that the unspeakable horrors are borne witness to, not just seen, but felt and remembered.

“

To embroider is to decide something is worth the effort – hours, days and weeks of labour. This is to insist it is not lost to the sheer volume of images that pass briefly before our eyes.