Occupied Imaginations: The Role of Art in Palestinian Resistance

This piece was originally published in the August 2025 issue of Pandora Curated.

Illustrations by Yashashree Arawkar

“The reality that I lived prior to 7 October has changed. I no longer have a safe house that shelters me and my small family. The rockets have fallen on my drawing studio (my little world) and destroyed it, and the planes have wiped out all the future plans I had for my children. The steel bird killed my small cat Sarah, and chewed her soft meat, before the cat could pass on her seven souls to my children.” - Maisara Baroud, 2024

For Palestinians, the plea is urgent: to be heard, felt, and freed from genocidal occupation. From the Nakba of 1948 to Israel’s ongoing assault on their right to exist, Palestinians have been rendered inconsequential, expelled from the global imaginary. How, then, can they be heard? 

From universities and governments to art institutions, the Palestinian question has become unutterable. The ideals of free thought, of empathy, and liberation characteristic of this infrastructure are then smothered, policed and pathologised. 

Even in professedly progressive democracies, repression abounds as the UK’s supposed left-wing Labour government criminalises Palestine Action — a direct action network opposing the complicit British arms industry — as a ‘terrorist’ organisation. In this climate, where truth and noble resistance are punished, it is perhaps through art — that space where death matters and the heart is important — that Palestinians can be heard, and supported. 

Art as Hope

Art is a way we can realise our imagination, feel its potential and piece it into a form of hope. Upon entering the Edinburgh Palestine Museum, one is not first encountered by images of ruin, but by Anani’s grand canvas of rolling hills, lush green trees, and floral meadows. Where one enters expecting violence, Anani’s painting embraces us in its haven and pokes at our presumptions: Why is it that people expect only darkness when they hear of Palestine? 

The piece also reimagines nationalism: how can we conceive of a country beyond violence, flags and the fictitious names we stand for in global contests of power? It proposes instead that we let our environment represent us, the gentle earth we came from and call our own. Here, it becomes clear that Palestinian art is not only a record of loss, but also an assertion of futurity. The art builds new imaginaries which build resistance by refusing to centre the occupation as the totality of Palestinian life. 

A participant in a Nablus creative art group stated, “When we draw, we imagine that we are living in beautiful houses in a comfortable place . . . The most important thing to me is to draw rooms and beds for my children”. These are simple desires, but allow one to transcend the material body for a moment and engage in Marxist philosopher Bloch’s (1954) ‘principle of hope’ — the practice of envisioning the future as an act of resistance in itself. 

Amid drones and checkpoints, art offers solace and psychological resistance. “If there isn’t a way to express myself through rap, I will carry stones,” said one young man from Mada Silwan Creative Centre, signifying that art not only transforms pain but redirects violence into processing and meaning-making.

Yet, we must ask: is the global embrace of Palestinian art driven by a preference for a more “palatable” victim, someone who paints or writes instead of resisting physically? Perhaps violence is justified. Perhaps other forms of resistance are more vital. In this realm, art is striving to humanise an inhumane situation, attempting to make visible a brutality beyond language. It is right that Palestinians are tired of having to manufacture this empathy where it should naturally reside. This is a dehumanising condition, constructing passive victims of a population that has desires of its own. Direct action, or legal advocacy, may then offer a more autonomous, material route for change than that which art provides.

Thus, while many valorise the artivists, others, like Palestinian writer Saeed Teebi, express feelings of uselessness (2024). Art, he argues, is not an essential service like food or medical care. In this light, the question lingers: Does art truly do enough? Not on its own. However, as a means of cultivating solidarity and imagination, art plays a critical role in the broader ecosystem of resistance. It may be art that mobilises the activist or inspires a juridical inquiry.

Art's persistence perhaps hints at its utility. Graffiti sprawled across the West Bank Wall resists erasure by declaring Palestinian presence. It is a mode of visual protest that reclaims space and manifests sumud, the Palestinian ethic of steadfastness. 

Presently, Palestinians have lost everything: their homes, rights and lives. Golda Meir’s historic claim that ‘there is no such thing as Palestinians’ has become institutionalised. In this horrifying condition, art is a way to signal and retain the truth; that they do and shall continue to exist. We feel. You must witness us. When all other means of documentation are lost, art holds on to the memory and pain, making it a political tool just as essential as alternative means of resistance. 

Art as a Political Tool

Art politicises the Palestinian experience by recontextualising everyday life as a terrain of conflict. Depictions of waiting in checkpoint lines, carrying water, or rebuilding homes reveal how occupation invades the mundane. Art also makes subjects out of what are attempted objects, inscribing the agency that has been stolen by degrading media and political institutions.

Though often described as a non-violent form of resistance, art is anything but passive. It performs a symbolic violence against silence, settler-colonial erasure, and narrative domination. To create art under occupation is to disrupt Israel’s intent, laying the ground for solidarity and global action.

Through what LaCapra, scholar of trauma and cultural memory, calls “empathetic unsettlement,” art emotionally disarms. Palestinian art forces people to feel beyond the dominant discourse. Whether through the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish or the art of Khalil Rabah, one is drawn into a relation. Khaled Jarrar stamping people's passports with a State of Palestine emblem or creating soccer balls made from the wall’s rubble produces a visceral interaction with the physicality of occupation, one which audiences can’t squirm free from. As Dr Laidi Hanieh, director of the West Bank’s Palestine Museum, reflects: “[...] you can definitely acquire knowledge and change your perceptions by an aesthetic experience, by an emotional experience”.

In Western and Zionist imaginaries, Palestinians are often rendered abject, a term theorised by philosopher and psychoanalyst Kristeva, to describe that which "disturbs identity, system, [and] order”. It is what must be expelled from the nation, the symbolic mandate, to maintain an illusion of purity and coherence. Their very presence disrupts the colonial fantasy of a seamless, unbroken state. The border wall itself spatially casts the Palestinians as a pollution or threat.

In this space, Palestinian art responds by refusing the role of abject subject. Through murals, poetry, and photos, artists reinstate Palestinian presence in space, refiguring a site of trauma as a site of articulation. Awad’s photography series, Faces of Resilience, uses the smiles of local women bearing fruits in their hands to confront the notion of abjection and affirm humanity. Staring into the eyes of Awad’s subject, one struggles to demonise or reject and instead welcomes and locates a bond.

Some artists instead embrace the aesthetic of abjection, employing discomfort to destabilise norms and unearth truth. Artists Emily Jacir and Larissa Sansour, who engage with fragments, ruins, and objects of displacement, can be read through Lushetich's (2019) ‘necropolitical aesthetics’, which frames art as a site of mourning that refuses closure. Writing on the intersection of art and power, Lushetich uses this term to name artistic processes which expose how political regimes exercise control over life and death. Here, it is made visible through the bodies and the debris of the occupied. 

At the Palestine Museum, sculptures of decapitated heads and mutilated limbs do not ask for mere pity, but instead demand recognition. The abjection here serves to rupture the colonial confidence; they become the sublime: too powerful to look away from and too human to erase.

Shibli, a Palestinian author and academic, emphasises the linguistic violence Palestinians face, where language itself becomes a battleground. Words like "Palestine" are erased from maps and road signs, turning Arabic and Palestinian identity into taboo. This suppression leads to what she describes as a "loss of language," a product of “staying with the pain” — reinforcing how visual, musical or spatial art provides a critical alternative. 

But how much can art change? Does it reach those in power, or merely soothe the conscience of the elite?

Palestinian Interaction with Dominant Art Institutions

In some ways, the art world opens doors for the movement, allowing it to expand into ‘elite’ conversations and evoke pathos in scenes that hold potential for change. However, access is difficult and censorship is rife. Faisel Salah, Founder and Executive Director of the Palestine Museum in the US, explained that it was difficult to exhibit at the Venice Biennale, requiring navigation of diplomatic hurdles. Palestine’s lack of national recognition meant exclusion from formal national pavilions, as reported by Winter in 2023. 

Nevertheless, this exact inception of Palestinian works into dominant spaces creates a pause in the typical order, a nudge against the comfort of the art gallery, by forcing people to question the very validity of these spaces. One is prompted to see them not as educational institutions, but instead to witness them in action, seeing what they truly do: meaning-making and the building of narratives. When one witnesses Abu Sitta’s recreation of an 1877 Map of Palestine, it not only discloses the erasure of Palestine from cartographic records after Israel’s founding, but deconstructs our very idea of ‘history’ — while simultaneously embedding the notion of return.

Representation, in this sense, is never neutral and very distinct from reflection, as cultural critic and academic Edward Said (1993) notes. Representation necessitates selection and construction, not simply transmission of pre-existent notions, but the greater act of meaning-making. Here, Palestinian artists reclaim autonomy in narrative constructions about themselves, able to both depict and challenge imperial processes. 

Still, at the UK Palestine Museum, as we stand in a pristine gallery on the streets of Edinburgh’s New Town, far from rubble or checkpoints, we must ask: what does it mean to bear witness in such safety? Banksy attempted to collapse this distance, creating work in Gaza that could only be seen in person, demanding proximity and risk from those who wished to consume it.

Hegemonic art practices also infringe on the very idea of how to make art and make it difficult for Palestinian art to access engagement or fit neatly into creative categorisations. Noor Hindi’s following extract, from the poem Fuck Your Lecture On Craft, My People Are Dying, tells of the way convention and normative art tropes squash and drown the Palestinian struggle, and asks how one truly articulates the unspeakable violence and loss at stake?

Colonisers write about flowers.

I tell you about children throwing rocks at Israeli tanks

seconds before becoming daisies.

[...]

One day, I’ll write about the flowers like we own them.

The poem's broken structure and refusal of metaphor signal a demand to transcend the hegemony of craft and speak urgently and politically. This piece is a call for decolonisation of content, form, authorship and audience too. By rejecting abstraction, Hindi insists that Palestinian resistance not be reduced to symbol or sentiment. She underscores the violence of representation itself—how aesthetic form can become complicit in erasure, and asks, is it at all ethical to formulate beauty from such devastation? 

Indeed, Palestinian artists are acutely aware of these risks. Many deliberately rupture aesthetic pleasure through fragmented narratives, abrasive sound, or self-implicating works, to avoid smoothing over pain. They remind us that beauty is not neutral. It can wound or awaken. It can be silent or scream.

Palestinian art is not a consolation; it is a confrontation. It resists not only military occupation but narrative domination, offering an effective politics rooted in both grief and hope. In a world that seeks to erase Palestine, art becomes an archive, a protest, a lifeline. It is not a substitute for aid or action, but it shapes how and why we act. To engage with Palestinian art is not merely to observe; it is to reckon with complicity and be moved to solidarity. In the face of compelled silence, the sculpture, the poem, and the mural proclaim: “We are here. We remember. We imagine otherwise.” 

Edited by the Curated Editorial Team

Harriet Sanderson (she/her) is a Politics and Sociology student at the University of Edinburgh and a contributor to Pandora Curated. She is a writer interested in protest politics, direct action, and mutual aid, and investigates how the ‘local’ is contextualised within wider geopolitical shifts. She is passionate about bridging academic theory and lived experiences, and leans into this paradox in her writing.

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References:

• Baroud, M 2024, ‘“Instead of a scream”: the Palestinian artist who does a Gaza drawing every day’, The Guardian, 14 May.

• Ernst Bloch 1954, The principle of hope, Mit Press, Cambridge, Mass.

• Freeman, J 2023, ‘“In the last four weeks language has deserted me”: Adania Shibli on being shut down’, The Guardian, 9 November.

• Kristeva, J 1982, Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection, Columbia University Press, New York.

• LaCapra, D 2014, Writing History, Writing Trauma, JHU Press.

• Lushetich, N 2018, The Aesthetics of Necropolitics, Rowman & Littlefield.

• Naima Morelli 2023, The Tapestry of Palestinian History: The Palestine Museum in Bir Zeit, Informed Comment, viewed 28 July 2025, https://www.juancole.com/2023/08/tapestry-palestinian-palestine.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com.

• Said, EW 1993, Culture and Imperialism, Vintage, London.

• Soulsby, LK, Jelissejeva, K & Forsythe, A 2019, ‘“And I’m in another world”. A qualitative examination of the experience of participating in creative arts groups in Palestine’, Arts & Health, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 63–72.

• Winter, R 2023, ‘“From Palestine with Art”: Dreams of Sovereignty and Acts of Resistance at the 2022 Venice Biennale’, react/review: a responsive journal for art & architecture, vol. 3, eScholarship Publishing, University of California, no. 0.

Keywords: Palestinian Art Resistance, Palestinian Cultural Identity, Palestine And Art Activism, Palestinian Art Under Occupation, Palestinian Art And Politics, Palestinian Cultural Resistance, Palestinian Museum Edinburgh, Palestinian Artists Contemporary, Palestinian Art Solidarity, Palestinian Art History, Palestinian Art Censorship, Palestinian Art As Hope, Palestinian Art And Memory, Palestinian Art Exhibitions, Palestinian Creative Resistance, Palestinian Visual Culture, Palestinian Poetry Resistance, Palestinian Rap And Hip Hop, Palestinian Graffiti West Bank, Palestinian Feminist Art, Palestinian Art Diaspora, Palestinian Art Institutions, Palestinian Art Biennale Venice, Palestinian Art And Trauma, Palestinian Art International Recognition