Contributions – open-weather

2025-05-07 11:48:24

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

United Kingdom

NOAA-19

Last night, at an event called We Are Not Numbers at the Southbank Centre, Palestinian writer Ahmed Alnaouq and artist Malak Mattar shared stories from their personal lives and those of their family members in Gaza. Malak described an event of being denied border crossing into Israel for the purpose of showing her paintings in an exhibition in Jerusalem when she was just a teenager, and realising for the first time that she was 'in a cage'. Ahmed spoke about how writing and storytelling helped him emerge from a depression after his 23-year old brother was killed in an Israeli airstrike in 2014. Both spoke about the sometimes visible, sometimes invisible barriers to speaking about Palestine in the UK. In Palestine, Malak said, "I would never be barred from speaking at my own exhibition". Yet she spoke about countless experiences of being silenced in the UK, whether in arts institutions or in public forums. Ahmed added that UK institutions are so concerned about being 'neutral' that they implicitly support Israel's genocide. For me, hearing these claims, especially from Palestinian artists whose family members have been killed in the current genocide and in previous Israeli assaults on life in Gaza, made the conditions of speaking, voicing and expressions of mere humanity in the UK more palpable than ever before.

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