Is there Poetry after Gaza?

Dreadful times we are going through, to see exhibitions, to watch films, to see/ read/ hear much beyond the annihilation of peoples and their environments around the world. As speech and action in support of Palestine are forcibly repressed in public and cultural spaces in Europe, Basma al-Sharif’s The Place Where I was Condemned to Live was courageously on view at de Appel, Amsterdam from July to September 2024. The works in the exhibition depict the complexities of home, ownership, placelessness, and history through stories and experiences that take place in Palestine and the surrounding region. Writing about the exhibition by myself wasn’t possible: How can someone who is for human rights, freedom of movement, and the right to self-determination, but who is not from Palestine, who hasn’t been through what the Palestinians have, write about this exhibition? I am also suspicious of the echo-chambers that structure public discourse—i.e., the culture in which people only engage with others who share their position and opinions, and thus never reach beyond their own circle. But I felt I had something to say about the works through my own perpetually nomadic life, my questions about authorship and ownership, about belonging and hospitality as an architect and migrant living in the Netherlands. The neglect and ignorance by the media in the Global North toward the dehumanization of the people in Gaza provoked me. I initiated a conversation with Saja Amro, who is active in the movement in the Netherlands, enabling our perspectives to come together and influence each other, and to think about the exhibition together.

Following Megan Hoetger’s recommendation to have this dialogue for The Public Review, I got in touch with Amsterdam–based curator Hilda Moucharrafieh and we went to see the exhibition. Al-Sharif’s four multimedia installations focused on new cities and urban transformation, ownership and belonging, and unbearably reversed worlds. They appear in an institution whose own recent history echoes many of these concerns. De Appel relocated to Tempel on Tolstraat in early 2024 after searching for a location for years—among the harsher experiences of gentrification in the Netherlands. The building was constructed a century ago as a theosophical temple, commissioned by Amsterdam philanthropists “in search of the common core of science, philosophy, and religion.”1 The sharp decline in interest in theosophy and the building’s resulting disuse led the space to take on new roles: as a synagogue (1937-1942), a Nazi propaganda cinema (1943), a cinema run by the Theosophical Society until 1979, then a mosque, and a public library, before it became the creative incubator (broedplaats) Tempel. De Appel’s assumption of this space comes at a moment in which the Netherlands looks for radical new meanings for “culture,” “public,” “philanthropy,” and “cultural institution.”

Hilda introduced me to Saja Amro. Saja is, in her words, a Palestinian–born and –raised woman, an architect, educator, and immigrant in the Netherlands. Her culture, heritage, and grandmother are the source of her knowledge and inspiration. I sent Saja questions about what caught her attention among Basma al-Sharif’s works, what her experience of hospitality is in the Netherlands, what Palestine is for her, and how she can relate or inflect her knowledge with the exhibition. This text is the result of a conversation between us.

Merve: Where are you now?

Saja: Just arrived in Ramallah. Yesterday I was in Dura, my home city, situated to the south of Hebron. We woke up to an explosion. At first, I thought the war erupted here—Iran’s response to Haniyeh’s assassination. However, my mom clarified and calmed me down. She had been up all night following the news. Israel’s occupying forces spent the night placing explosives inside a martyr’s house, which is a common practice of collectively punishing the family, neighbors, and people in proximity to the martyr. They pushed the button at 6:15 in the morning.

Merve: It’s not at all comparable to fearing for one’s own life, but I feel that fear is the experience we are forced to live in. Fear of a war spreading, fear of being rejected a residence permit, fear of being sent back or deported, fear of losing our jobs and livelihoods. In relation to al-Sharif’s exhibition I was thinking, can exhibitions make space or be instrumental for solidarities among those who don’t accept to live within the narrative of fear? 

Saja: Artists are knowledge producers and art plays a big role in evolving communities. I can't articulate or define what its role is amid a genocide. Art is expression, but when it’s governed by institutional economies, it turns into a tool for exclusion rather than inclusion. The limitations imposed by funding conditions and the inaccessibility and hyper-intellectualization of language that dominate the field as if we’re in a competition for who uses bigger words—these factors make me question the integrity the art world claims to uphold. The intensity of the current period makes me ask, why art at all? We’re in urgent need of an unpretentious art. Art needs to leave the ivory tower and root itself within the true concerns of the masses.

Merve: Part of it is to not assume that I am exempt from my surroundings, like you say, from the economy of the systems that create these institutions for art, culture, and education... and then how do I avoid giving in to the fear of these systems? One tries to continue and not let fear stop them or get cynical in the face of reality, one tries to remake these institutions or create others. Another part of it adds to your comment on intellectualization. It makes me think of a lack of embodiment, whether individual or collective, in the institution—the body, the emotions, the intellect altogether: Can the institution be part of a feeling of togetherness, through what it exhibits, programs, institutes? How can it make space for grief and anger, and for supporting each other as migrants, as exiles? How can it actively produce politics and knowledge, not as a reactive response to the social nor as a product for immediate consumption? Then this brings me to think about resilience, how it can be oppressive to ask a migrant to be resilient in the host’s land. But I, as a migrant, also claim to be resilient in the host’s land, even if I know my survival here is a privilege compared to my friends’ struggles for life in the place I left. Can a cultural institution hold space for these complexities?

Saja: I went to the exhibition with these questions, and because Hilda told me to go. I had one day to see it before I left for Palestine. Climbing up the stairs after a long day, I was longing to crash on the beautiful, comfortable chair in front of the installation CAPITAL (2020). The set design in the film was an extension of the exhibition’s scenography, or the other way around. Homey and familiar, the chairs, including the diwan, reminded me of upper-middle-class Palestinian people’s houses in the 1980s and ’90s. People who immigrated to the Gulf for work and made enough money to buy an apartment in Amman and furnish it—a house for retirement, where you can host your extended family and cook large feasts on Fridays. Although there was no noticeable smell in the exhibition, my brain couldn’t help but evoke the scent of a home.

CAPITAL looks like a staged living room, a TV playing scenes of what seems to be a new compound under construction, a woman in a brown dress orgasming over a phone call with a man speaking in Italian... [Abdel Fattah el-]Sisi appears on the screen! Suddenly the installation becomes more interesting! Sisi is an internet sensation, isn’t he? The work serves as an elongated Sisi meme. The critique of the new administrative capital in Egypt becomes more obvious as the scene progresses, but it provokes a question about the choice of bringing the above elements together. What if it was an Egyptian woman instead? Why Italian? And why eroticism in response to real estate sales? I wonder where the inspiration came from, the artist’s relationship to each element, and how she embedded different cultures, aesthetics, and references into one narrative.

Merve: There were some details in the overlaying text, for instance a person I assume is a state official (or Sisi?) claiming these projects didn’t come out of nowhere, that there had always been thoughts, plans for these new housing and infrastructure projects, and that this government’s difference is that they didn’t miss the opportunity when it arose. This language is so familiar from Turkey; Egypt and Turkey are brothers in mind, capitalist machines of social and environmental destruction.

And I wouldn’t have been surprised if the location turned out to be Istanbul, with its shiny, luxurious, and spectacular images. New Istanbul was built with the same global real estate infrastructures and systems as New Cairo. There is no armed war in these countries, but I don’t think it is different than domicide in the sense that people’s homes are destroyed, they get displaced, entire neighborhoods are erased. A New Netherlands is also being built today, in a similar real estate logic of gated communities—Nieuw Delft, Nieuw West (Amsterdam), Nieuwe Defensie (Utrecht)... We will see in a few years if these new developments solve or only postpone the actual housing crisis, or if the developers just make more profit selling the promise of a green, pink, segregated life to the aspirationally wealthy.

Saja: It also reminded me of Dubai—both familiar and unfamiliar. Despite having visited Cairo many times and following Egyptian politics—which, by the way, can be quite entertaining—if it hadn’t been explicitly stated, I wouldn’t have known the setting was Cairo. I unintentionally felt the urge to discover the artist through her work, I watched it again and found myself enjoying the upbeat soundtrack—it was surprisingly funny. Aesthetically, the video was pleasing, even down to the actress’s dress. I see parallels in Ramallah now, which I’m visiting for the first time in four years, and I’m struck by the rapid construction of residential compounds and the polluted air. In Ramallah the only option for expansion is upward due to land control restrictions and administrative divisions after the Oslo Accords. With a growing Palestinian population and available capital, rapid and poorly regulated construction has taken off.

Merve: I was thinking I could bring architecture students to the exhibition to discuss with them what gated communities do to citizens, how the interiors of these new cities are also new urbanisms—they make new worlds exclusive to those living in them, promising “revolutionary world class lives,” then citizens can choose to not know about what happens outside or elsewhere but live on a phone line that will keep selling them orgasms.2

Saja: If I wasn’t so critical of modern architecture and the systems behind it in my work, if I didn’t question the facade of modernity and what it conceals, I’d probably be excited by fancy modern buildings, sleek compounds, the allure of modernity and civilization. I might actually enjoy the scenes from a commercial film. I might even fantasize about buying a house there and daydream about my perfect Americanized modern life in Egypt. It’s almost... erotic.

Merve: Do you find the video cynical but not critical?

Saja: I appreciate art that makes you question things without the need to find definitive answers. While I recognize its importance, I don’t take it too seriously—art can only be critical or carry such messages up to a certain point. Can art, for instance, contribute to decolonization? Decolonization requires action and groundwork, but art may play a role in liberation. Liberation demands imagination, and art is a powerful tool in creating mental spaces for lingering in worlds that could one day exist.

Merve: The actor in the video on the phone says at one point “in what language do you talk about fascism; German, Italian, English?” All of them were colonizers of Egypt. He might as well have added Turkish in there. There is something about this cynicism that brings me back to these new cities, the continuum of mechanisms that produce them and how people live in them. I’m afraid there is no city left to offer at the end of this process where people can feel or produce some sort of collective ownership or belonging, where they feel entitled and empowered to create their own life and surroundings. These new cities and new urbanisms erase the existing spaces of gathering, spaces of togetherness, creating opposite worlds of nonplaces.

The feature-length film in the exhibition, Ouroboros (2017), opens with a scene of reversed drone footage of waves rolling away from the shore in Gaza before going inland across the beach, a busy road, and the buildings. This beautiful blue and yellow vision is enticing, but since the footage is reversed, it signals that there is something odd about this story. The film is about the reverse world. The name of the film comes from the Hellenic symbol of the serpent eating its own tail, which refers to the infinity of nothingness, or endlessness, and also expresses the unity of all things, material and spiritual, which never disappear but perpetually change form in an eternal cycle of destruction and re-creation.

Saja: In much of the film, it feels like only one character occupies the space. When I think of Gaza, I envision a house full of life, 12 grandchildren rushing in on Fridays to eat maqluba, a family feast. I long to see Gaza depicted as a place of life, not just death and destruction. I crave this comforting illusion wrapped in wishful delusion. That’s what I felt was missing from the film. It reduced the scene to a single character, relying on symbolism, and reduced Gaza to a cycle of destruction and reconstruction. I feel it’s a missed opportunity, a dialogue would have been really nice. But the film is not about that, I guess!

Merve: It is uncanny to watch Ouroboros today, to see views of Gaza other than those presented in media, tragedy or terror. The news either makes it invisible or really big, pushing on the contrast, the dark colors, to make it look more ominous, evoking pain and pity in people’s emotions; then you are numb and can’t think of the systems and infrastructures that create such pain. I was thinking what we would see from the drone footage of Gaza today, and how many journalists who would be doing this work are not alive anymore.

Saja: I often think of how my perception has been shaped by the media. For instance, we are conditioned to view women in Afghanistan as victims, forgetting to recognize their fullness as humans with lives, histories, and connections. This happens even though, as a Palestinian, I share similar struggles and know what it means to be constantly portrayed as a victim. I always have to pause and clear my perspective to remember what’s obvious. The screen works to separate, isolate, and objectify the other. At the risk of stating the obvious, Gaza may have been reduced to dust, but from that same land, tunnels to other worlds were excavated, monuments to lives and legacies have risen, reaching out to every corner of the cosmos, from the smallest particles to the largest galaxies, proposing that the world can be different, and our lives can be different; we dream, imagine, and obsessively crave a liberated world. Gaza is mighty.

Merve: When you move to A Philistine (2019-2023), it feels like a completely different atmosphere, right? A Philistine is mainly the booklet with stories, the low table that the booklets are on, and the diwan around it. This diwan is so comfortable I even took a little nap, and it definitely helps to sit down to read the stories. From the same diwan at the end of the day, I watched Ouroboros on the opposite wall of the space. The exhibition asks for time to be spent in the space.

A Philistine is almost the exact opposite of CAPITAL—the train versus the compound house, the mobile cabin versus the territorialized living, the continuous movement versus individual ownership. I was enchanted by the stories, but also thinking how the train is a major element of the whole story that produces the stutters. The way the stories were written kept on bringing me to that ruined, incomplete, colonial infrastructure of the Berlin–Baghdad rail line.

Saja: A Philistine was my favorite piece in the exhibition, how the artist depicts the stories of multiple couples meeting in different times. Their reproduction results in the birth of the main character the story continues with—she is from a mixed descent, but part of her identity is Palestine. She visits Palestine and there, the writer takes us on a mythical journey on a land without borders where all species intertwine in a web of desire, a scene of indulgence unfolds—a utopia of sensuality. Erotic, yet again. Al-Sharif’s writing on these taboo topics was refreshing. I don’t think I could take this booklet with me to Palestine—if my mom found it, I might be in trouble…

Merve: Do you think they wouldn’t understand?

Saja: The Palestinian art scene often feels like a bubble dominated by the intellectual elite, separated from the religious and God-centered reality of the rest of Palestine. A lot of other Palestinian art focuses on uncovering and documenting the Palestinian reality (whatever that is) and trying to preserve and communicate our story and culture to the world—the type of art the West expects from us. In conservative cities like my hometown, Dura, and many other Palestinian cities, women are expected to never talk publicly about intimate topics. I find this piece refreshing considering all these parallel realities. The stories stand out to me, almost mythical, like the story of Noah’s Ark—but instead of a ship, it’s a train, with people moving freely between cities without the burden of checkpoints and siege, embracing sexual openness. It evokes a dream—or perhaps a nightmare—that many lack the courage or capacity to imagine. The artist reimagines Palestine without boundaries, unshackled by the status quo, the limitations imposed by occupation, religious ideologies, societal taboos, or regional traditions. There’s a generosity and courage in the way she shares this vision, and in how she sees herself within it. I find that deeply inspiring and liberating.

Merve: Do you think the written form asserts more imagination?

Saja: Many people might criticize it, but deep down they’d still want to read it, probably in secret, hiding it under their bed. The worn, old paper it’s written on adds to the effect. I never thought erotic stories could be this political, and certainly not looking this rusty. The use of Lebanese dialect also caught me off guard—it felt very bold and unapologetic. It’s the kind of thing you’d expect someone to write but never dare publish. Yet, the artist put it on display in an exhibition.

Merve: Did you read it in Arabic?

Saja: Yes. English then Arabic.

Merve: Did it make a difference?

Saja: The version in Arabic reads better.

Merve: I liked that Philistine was both the character and the story.

Saja: She was talking about the terms Berber and Philistine as synonyms. Is that fiction or real?

Merve: Is it related to how Berber and Barbarian are interchangeably used to refer to the uncivilized?

Saja: Berber means the other. We have been through that othering, all of us.

Merve: Indeed, whether Palestinians or foreigners. But also less intelligent, less civilized, inappropriate. You can also be a Berber in Turkish, by the way. So, for me, the work is also an acknowledgement of embracing that Berber position and taking it further… I also want to echo what you said before: I felt close to the story. I am that nomadic person because of all kinds of experiences within the family, the village, the nation-state. Community can also be a mechanism of oppression. Sometimes I think that whenever I feel I have a home I destroy it, or the things that I can’t go back to now feel like home to me. This work but also the whole exhibition speaks to this conflict. I can’t help but wonder if this was also what al-Sharif was thinking when referring to the place of living as condemnation.


Modernity makes someone rootless and groundless. This is also what it needs to sustain itself. Modernity enjoys that I have become rootless, by leaving home. When I think of it this way, the train is the survival; that it can be a mobile home. Then, on another level, I have become comfortable in the position of the rootless, the unfitting and inappropriate. It brought me to a point where I don’t restrain myself from intervening, interfering, because there is no expectation of me that I will act civilized, like, I’m just going to destroy all of you! This makes me sleepless a lot of the time, but it gives me the space to not refrain from what I want to say and do, and to ask for hospitality in that way, if anyone is going to offer it. This is what I felt when I watched CAPITAL and read the stories in A Philistine.

Saja: This kind of refusal, saying “no,” is what keeps me alive in the face of all forms of oppression. For me, the greatest oppression is Zionism and the occupation. Growing up during the Second Intifada, I can feel the imprints of the occupation on my body and the corners of my brain. I managed to leave that geography to a supposedly more progressive one. Scam! Now I live in a society that practices alternative kinds of oppression, an unfamiliar facade that reproduces familiar feelings. In Palestine, staying alive is a form of resistance. Here, in the Netherlands, I’ve had to find new ways to resist. In a place where bodies like mine are met with hostility (not hospitality), conforming to whiteness and false narratives feels like the erasure of one’s entire existence, like robbery. I demand justice, and it feels futile, like screaming into the void. My resistance is about centering the Palestinian narrative, rejecting the Western one. Sometimes it feels like I’m an ant, trying to push a mountain on my own. Every day, I seek the company of other ants so that we can push together and hype each other up along the way. That delusion gives life a sense of purpose and joy.

Resistance in this context is about telling the stories produced in Palestine, written by Palestinians on the front lines of the struggle—those who dare to dream of liberation, the political prisoners, the martyrs. These are people who, if you mention their names, are labeled as terrorists. Resistance is living by their voices and their language, unafraid to bring their truth to the surface.

Merve: I so much appreciate this critical point to the West, as well as to yourself and others. What does this say about the attitude needed from the (cultural) institutions?

Saja: Just being real—refusing to lie or sugarcoat things—is a way of rejecting these systems. I believe in using accessible language, forming genuine, non-condescending connections, and staying curious while questioning norms. Institutions often create a sense of intimidation toward both artists and audiences, rooted in their exclusivity. The hyper-intellectualization of concepts and the air of self-importance reinforce this. In light of what's happening in the world today, I’m reminded of my grandmother’s saying: “عبال مين يلي بترقص في العتمة,” which means, “Calm down, you’re too insignificant to be seen by the masses, you who is dancing in the darkness.”

1 Teun Dominicus, "Kunstcentrum de Appel verhuist naar ‘cultureel bruisende gemeenschap’ in de Diamantbuurt," Het Parool, August 28, 2023, https://www.parool.nl/nederland/kunstcentrum-de-appel-verhuist-naar-cultureel-bruisende-gemeenschap-in-de-diamantbuurt~b14aa265/. 

2 Quoted from al-Sharif’s installation.

Saja Amro is an architect, educator, and designer based in the Netherlands and Palestine. Her work investigates the influence of spatial design on social dynamics in education. In her practice, she disrupts traditional classroom structures, aiming to rebuild them on the principles of radical pedagogy. As a tutor at the Architecture Department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Saja uses the classroom as a place to collaborate with her students and reimagine spaces inspired by popular education methodologies, and roots of indigenous cultures. Saja co-founded Common Ground, a collaborative artistic gastronomic project focusing on using the dining table and the kitchen as research laboratories and spaces for knowledge production and exchange.

Merve Bedir is an architect. Her work focuses on infrastructures of hospitality and mobility. A secondary line of research refers to the collective intelligences and imaginaries of the landscape. Merve is co-director of Aformal Academy in Pearl River Delta region, founding member of Kitchen Workshop in Gaziantep, and Center for Spatial Justice in Istanbul. Her most recent exhibition participation is in Designing Peace, Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum; architectural design project is Postane repair project in Istanbul; and publication is on cityzenship as feminist infrastructures in FKW, no.75. Merve holds a PhD from Delft University of Technology, and a BArch from Middle East Technical University in Ankara. She is currently a visiting professor in École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

Installation views: courtesy of de Appel, photos: Sigrún Gyða Sveinsdóttir

Film stills: courtesy de Appel, © Basma al-Sharif

This text was supported by a Public Humanities Grant from Humanities NY.