February 6–July 20, 2025
It’s an easily forgotten fact that art can and does function as a politics that exceeds the institutional inadequacies of the westernized art market’s globalized mainstream. At this present moment, no exhibition makes that case more eloquently than “How to Work Together?” an object lesson in how artists can create the conditions to not only survive against the odds, but to flourish as close to their own terms as possible.
Presented across three rooms, this meticulously organized assemblage of paintings, photographs, and studies tracks the story of an artist collective founded in Gaza City in 2000, which adopted the name Eltiqa—Arabic for “encounter” or “meeting”—in 2002. Curated by the curatorial and research collective The Question of Funding, two parallel tracks are held together by a wooden scaffold system with display boards holding artworks alongside archive photos and numbered placards that trace Eltiqa’s evolution across time, highlighting the distinctive aesthetics of six core group members on the one hand, and their determination to support one another and their community through mutual aid on the other.
Paintings hung salon-style across the walls expand this review. Mohamed Abusal’s luminous oil paintings of cacti, including a bowl of bulbs glowing against a rich violet ground in Thorns and Flowers 1 (2014), are presented alongside watercolor studies that illuminate the artist’s focus: brilliant and forthright. Dina Matar’s pop-infused, folk-inflected depictions of daily life are bold in their diligent adherence to grounded traditions of cultural representation—not as generic statement but as a testament to life and its continuation, as with Woman and a Cactus (2023), in which the acrylic portrait of a woman dressed in a Kufic-patterned thobe is framed by the flower print of the silk scarf that forms the painting’s surface. Works like these amplify one comment by Mohammed Al-Hawajri, highlighted in a wall text, describing the artist’s desire to make art for art’s sake. In keeping with this stated ambition, Al-Hawajri’s geometric dissections of the canvas employ black-lined human and animal forms to produce rippling, organic blocks of acrylic color, as in The Sheep Market (2015), a horizontal canvas showing a multicolored line of women holding lambs.
Still, works in another section amplify what happens when artists come under fire, including two digital collages from Al-Hawajri’s “Guernica-Gaza” series (2010–13), with occupying Israeli forces inserted into Jean-François Millet’s paintings The Nap (1865) and Harvesters Resting (1850), reflecting Al-Hawajri’s point that artists can’t just paint flowers when reality is impossible to ignore. Pinned to one wall are sixty-two studies rendered using tea, coffee, hibiscus juice, charcoal, and pencil on found paper, from Raed Issa’s “My Studio in the Tent” series, created in Gaza in 2024. These eyewitness accounts capture people toiling under Israel’s unrelenting siege and assault on the Gaza Strip—deemed genocidal by a chorus of international experts, humanitarian organizations, and an increasingly enraged global majority—with a dignity deserving of those surviving unimaginable violence. Nearby, Soheil Salem’s “Diaries from Gaza” series (2024), likewise honors the struggle to live under Israel’s bombs, with twenty black, blue, and red pen drawings on monetary paper filtering the war on Gaza into stylized testimonies of an intergenerational struggle for liberation across Palestine—a living history amplified by Issa’s oil on board Untitled (“Tragedy” series), created in 2002 amid the Second Intifada, of corpses emerging from furious earth-toned strokes.
Of course, it’s near impossible for Palestinian artists to escape the political framing of their existence. That explains why Eltiqa’s timeline starts in 1948, the year of the Nakba: a catastrophe remembered on May 15 each year. On this day in 1998, Eltiqa’s founding members Mohamed Dabous, Al-Hawajri, Issa, and Abusal, then operating as Liberated Colours, unveiled the first public mural in Gaza, Jerusalem is a Bridge for Return. Key events in the timeline that follows reveal a momentum that has propelled the group forward since, thanks to their determination to live as artists and help one another along the way, including a residency at Darat Al Funun in Jordan in 1999; a grant from Dr Fathi Arafat to produce artworks for the Palestine Red Crescent Society hospital in 2001; and exhibitions in Ramallah, Geneva, Amman, and Rodez in 2003. As the collective grew in scale and scope, numerous grants from various sources increased through the years. So too did the ferocity of Israeli incursions on the Strip, including in 2001, when Al-Hawajri’s home was shelled; 2014, when Issa’s home and studio was bombed; and 2024, when the collective’s gallery space in Gaza City, a community space that nurtured the exclave’s next generations, fell victim to Israeli airstrikes.
With all that in mind, the plight of Gaza extends well beyond the bounds of Israel’s blockade in this exhibition. That call is amplified by the journey many of the artworks in this exhibition took: smuggled out of Gaza with the help of individuals from international delegations, including two acrylic-on-canvas portraits of Gazan children from 2024 by Abdel Raouf Al-Ajouri. While these collaborators remain anonymous, another form of support is pointedly named: the lumbung gallery, a collective initiative formed during “lumbung one,” the preferred name for ruangrupa’s Documenta 15, which hosted an exhibition by Eltiqa and The Question of Funding to the ire of large sections of the German media and political class. The Question of Funding and lumbung gallery, one wall text notes, rallied to sell works by Eltiqa’s artists to support their evacuation from Gaza (not all have left)—a testament to the networks of support that emerged out of the German quinquennial, which arguably foreshadowed the unmasking of some western institutions and their complicity in a racist and imperialist agenda. What emerges is a classic story, of artists fueled by an impulse to create no matter the conditions—an impulse that should resonate with creators everywhere, no matter their birthplace.
