This Gaza Artist Drew Portraits Depicting a Lifetime of Wars

Bayan Abu Nahla’s artworks belong to the state of love and longing that we call Palestine.

This article was written while the author worked at the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit. It was originally published in Arabic in the Al-Akhbar Newspaper and translated into English by Rawan Masri for the Palestinian Museum. It was originally published in English by Mondoweiss.

“Image making begins with interrogating appearances and making marks…If one thinks of appearances as a frontier, one might say that painters search for messages which cross the frontier: messages which come from the back of the visible. And this, not because all painters are Platonists, but because they look so hard.”— John Berger, as quoted by Kamal Boullata in “To Measure Jerusalem: Explorations of the Square,” for the Journal of Palestine Studies.

“My art is melancholic, sorrowful, pointed. It takes on the function of art in catharsis by expressing the despondency planted within us by a cruel life. My art takes after my life, or how I feel about my life. To Gaza, all this poetic language is dedicated. Despite the ongoing war, I have many artworks for which feelings of ease and love are foundational.”— Bayan Abu Nahla

Bayan Abu Nahla is a Palestinian visual artist born in 2001. Originally from the ethnically cleansed village of Yibna in the Ramla subdistrict of Lydd, Bayan spent her childhood in the Yibna refugee camp in eastern Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. She has been drawing since childhood, and most of her artworks are ink on paper. The Rachel Corrie Children’s Center in Rafah played a major role in fostering an artistic culture in drawing, theater, and singing for her and the other children of Rafah before it closed down. In 2019, she enrolled in a diploma program in graphic design at the UNRWA Vocational College.Her works function as diary-keeping to process spontaneous ephemeral feelings and thoughts through pen and paper. She does not care much for other mediums, although she has painted on canvas and created video art. Paper scenes in ink and watercolors remain closest to her heart.Since her birth, Bayan has gone through several wars. In 2008, when she was in the second grade, war struck fear within her. But in 2014, she saw war as an adventure. Then during the May 2021 war in Gaza, she experienced an entirely new sense of fear. Bayan and her family had recently moved to the Tal al-Hawa neighborhood in Gaza City, where the occupation introduced carpet-bombing for the first timem, locally described as the use of “fire belts,” a common phrase during the current genocide. Their apartment was targeted and it was bombed before their very eyes. This fear, which appears in her artworks drawn after May 2021, is embodied by her characters’ eyes dripping blood and their features covered with bruises.

As for the current war, everything has changed. She says: “Our hopes and how we see the cause, Palestine, life — all have changed. The only constant is a bitter resentment.”

After finishing her studies at UNRWA Vocational College, she went on to join Banafsaj, a Tamer Institute for Community Education youth art team hosting discussions, drawings, and activities. There, she met the now-martyred artist, Muhammad Sami, artist Khaled Jarada, and other well-renowned figures. She also studied in the virtual workshops of the Eltiqa Art Gallery in Gaza. Most meaningful to her were the engraving and printing workshops. She loved the engraving technique because of her love for artworks that required a physical effort, whereas she found digital art less stimulating.

“The characters I draw resemble myself and the personalities around me, such as my immediate and extended family,” Abu Nahla has shared. “My father in particular stands out as an inspiration. Gaza is very present in my work. The characters’ features are covered in bruises that change color according to the emotions etched onto our faces — the gloom, the despair, the bleeding. Sometimes family figures appear in traditional wear, such as the mother in an embroidered dress, or thobe, as a marker of Palestinianness.”
Her favorite artworks include Elzaytona, which at the time of writing is on display in This is Not an Exhibition at the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit. It combines two distant seasons, autumn and spring.

Abu Nahla used to pass by the beautiful tree olive tree that served as her inspiration while working at the NAWA for Culture and Arts Association in Deir al-Balah as a youth arts workshop leader. The olive tree has been a recurring theme in Palestinian art. As the renowned Palestinian artist Samia Halaby has written:

“Olive trees are significant in the history of Palestine because they are primary parts of its economy. As I studied them, I saw great character in them. Their rugged beauty and usefulness have affected many others, especially peasants who tend these trees. Every day as I walked back home, I saw an old grandmother in a village thobe fussing about the olive trees of her family’s garden. She belonged to the olive tree every bit as much as the olive belonged to her; both are part of the essence of Palestine.”

Vera Tamari, another renowned Palestinian artist, used the olive tree in her installation work, “Tale of a Tree.” The artwork is comprised of small ceramic figurines of olive trees in bright colors, shaping the tops of the trees with her fingerprints. Thus, the olive tree appears as the subject of the individual and collective Palestinian narrative — not as a background prop.

Abu Nahla’s first exhibition experience was in 2022 as part of a group exhibition at the Rashad Shawa Cultural Center in Gaza, in which the martyred artist Halima al-Kahlout participated. The exhibition was sponsored by the Red Cross, whose presence Abu Nahla would go on to condemn: “After the betrayal we experienced during this war by the Red Cross, I regretted my participation. They are turning a blind eye to the genocide we are being subjected to.”

In 2023, Abu Nahla organized her first solo exhibition in Bethlehem, curated by the Palestinian academic and collector George al-Ama and the Power Group. Incredibly, she was able to transport original artworks from Gaza to Bethlehem.

While less attached to her digital artwork, they have been featured in the Sahab Museum, the Palestine Museum US, and spaces in Egypt, Holland, and California.

After living through multiple wars, Abu Nahla’s obsession with losing her artwork in the ensuing destruction was one of her biggest fears — a fear that eventually came true. During this genocide, Abu Nahla lost her home, her artworks, and her mementos. Notably, this included the precious childhood photo album so close to her heart from which she drew inspiration for one of her more distinguished art projects, created in the Shababek for Contemporary Art studio.

The martyr, Muhammad Sami

The mother said:
I did not see him walking in his blood
I did not see the purple flower on his foot
he was leaning against the wall
and in his hand
a cup of hot chamomile
he was thinking of his tomorrow …
— Mahmoud Darwish, A State of Siege

It was emotionally fraught for Abu Nahla to talk about Muhammad Sami, her martyred friend and colleague. She shared how they were one team:

“We were young, and getting to know art and the art world together. His soul departed during a ruthless and unfathomable massacre, the Baptist al-Ahli Hospital massacre. No one expected that such a death awaited Muhammad. The video of the bombing is frightening and shocking. Did he feel that he was martyred? On the morning of the massacre, Muhammad posted a video on his Instagram account in the hospital courtyard leading activities for children; by the evening, he and hundreds of other innocent people had become body parts! He was an authentic person, genuine and down-to-earth. We did not view each other as artists. It would have fit him to work with children, as he was a lively, energetic, and cheerful person. We visited each other a lot, especially when he had an art residency at Shababek where he worked on a piece forging technology with art ‘through creating QR codes that preserve Palestinian art from theft,’ reflecting the massacres being perpetrated in Shuja’iyya, his neighborhood in Gaza. With Tamer Kuhail, he had composed musical works during the war; music drowns out the sounds of warplanes. On the fiftieth anniversary of Ghassan Kanafani’s martyrdom, Muhammad painted two artworks to commemorate him as part of an exhibition by the Tamer Institute for Community Education, now on display at the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit. We were close to al-Baqa Café by the sea, al-Shifa Hospital, and Shababek and Eltiqa, whose headquarters are in beautiful simple old houses. We used to hang out to talk and scribble. We did not listen to the great artists, because they usually gave us unneeded advice. Since his martyrdom, I have tried to draw him many times, but I have not been able to finish even one artwork.”

October 7: al-Aqsa Flood

Abu Nahla and her family have since left their home in the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood of Gaza to head south to Rafah. Upon reflection, she says: “I cannot describe this war, because I am in a state of shock. I did not expect to live to see this day! My artworks thus far do not reflect what has happened; nothing can embody it in its totality. I can paint detached scenes from the war, but art cannot account for the overall ramifications. Art during wartime is a value devoid of necessity — a luxury disconnected from what is taking place, though it is important in documenting the day’s thoughts and feelings.”

When she was first displaced from her home, she took with her a notebook, pens, and watercolors, and began drawing daily. Losing her home, her artwork, her computer with photos of her artwork, and family photos and mementos also made her lose hope and confidence in art and the future. When she saw photos of the enemy army using her house as military barracks and a sniper position set up, she knew that she would never regain those memories untainted. Her home, a warm and cozy place where family existed as a daily practice, was no more.

Five months into the war, she left Gaza for Egypt.

Goodbye, Gaza

The Palestinians of Gaza are being put through the most intense terror that a human being can experience; the fear that they will die at any moment, or that everyone around them will die first, with no escape from the sounds of bombing, is so horrifying and constant that eventually you can only go numb. The most difficult moments are when you hear the news of someone’s martyrdom, people you never thought of dying, as Abu Nahla said about Sami. It is excruciating to imagine the details of how they were martyred — those of them who remained under the rubble until the last possible breath of oxygen, or those who died crushed under the rubble’s weight.

On displacement, a character appears in her artwork that embodies many of the people of Gaza during the war in the winter, especially in Rafah, where they wore layer upon layer of clothes after being forced to flee earlier in the fall and had left their winter clothes behind, unaware that the war would drag on for months. Exhausted and lost, people crammed in cars stuffed with their belongings was a commonly shared experience.

Abu Nahla’s once drew “Welcome to Gaza,” an artwork she made during the best moments of her life before the war. After the war had begun and the accompanying experiences of loss, displacement, fear, and death, and before she was finally able to seek refuge in another country, she modified the drawing and scribbled “Goodbye Gaza” on top of it. A work full of farewells and sorrow, it is something out of the final scene of a movie before characters part ways. She longs for the beautiful beachside, for the al-Baqa Café that she would visit throughout the year, and where she drew so many of her artworks.

To put it most simply, her works belong to the state of love and longing that we call Palestine.

The GoFundMe campaign to support the martyr Muhammad Sami’s surviving family can be found here.