To Survive to Witness, Marwan Nassar, Palestinian art
Gallery / 7 images
“Art in Gaza is not a luxury, but an existential necessity,” says Palestinian painter Marwan Nassar, whose new exhibition, To Survive to Witness, has just launched at London’s p21 Gallery.
Since the beginning of the genocide, Nassar has created over 400 paintings and drawings, which had previously been displayed by Art Zone Palestine, a platform focused on works which have been erased, destroyed or stolen amid war and occupation. To Survive To Witness presents a curated selection of over 40 limited-edition prints, which will also be available to buy.
The artist’s work depicts life in Gaza during a time of mass displacement, imposed starvation and constant aerial bombardment. His style is energetic and textured, bold and expressive rather than strictly realistic, and often carries a sense of movement. There is, unsurprisingly, an air of melancholy to many of his pieces, with lots of blue tones and faces rendered, with heavy brush strokes, in moments of grief and anxiety. But amid the devastation, Nassar finds moments of normality, and the effect is often more ambiguous than anything: it’s hard to discern whether the fishermen in one painting are experiencing a moment of serenity in nature, or lonely figures battling a storm.
Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, beginning in October 2023, has led to a clear stylistic shift in Nassar’s art. “My expression has become more tense, more attached to the everyday scene and its psychological and visual repercussions,” he says. Living in extremely volatile conditions has often deprived him of the tools he needs, along with sources of inspiration like novels, films and access to nature. “However, this reality offers vivid visual material and vibrant stories that stem from everyday details, allowing me to raise contemporary issues that keep pace with the age of digitisation, where art and politics intersect,” he says.
At the more practical level, the challenges of daily life in Gaza have had a notable impact on Nassar’s work. He has had to shift towards creating smaller pieces which can be easily transported in cases of displacement, having experienced difficulty in transporting larger paintings. It has become much harder to find the time and space to paint. Within the first year of the genocide, his studio was transformed into a shelter for displaced people, so he worked in the streets, in the yard of his house in Nuseirat camp, and then in various places of displacement, moving between a tent and the home of a relative.
“War has made everyday life almost impossible, and in my artistic practice I have had to rely on the simplest tools available: paper, ink, charcoal pens, and homemade food dyes.” He began to work with old papers and archival materials, blending drawing, text and colour to create new visual compositions. “The words on the pages became an organic element in the painting itself. Each printed word was considered a stand-alone narrative, part of Gaza’s historical memory.”
As the exhibition’s title suggests, art is for Nassar a form of witness and survival. “From the beginning, the goal was not just to record these events, but to explore the possibility of psychological survival in a harsh daily reality,” he says. “Every day, painting has remained a safe haven for me and my family, a space in which we try to think outside the realm of reality, and to find an outlet to breathe amid the general suffocation. It turned into a medicine and a doctor at the same time, rather than an abstract search for beauty.” More than just a means of survival, he believes that art produced in Gaza during this period is a visual document that “seeks to raise the level of global human solidarity” and resists the reduction of Palestinians to statistics in news articles. Present in every scene, he says, is a spirit which embodies “tragedy and steadfastness at the same time”.
In the early days of the genocide, his work had a “documentary character”, but over time, the experience had a more profound impact on his aesthetic approach and view of life. “In this context, art was not a decorative act,” he says, “but rather an act of defiance and resistance; a confrontation with beauty and meaning.”
To Survive to Witness is running at p21 Gallery, London, until March 13, 2025
