“How You Curate Genocide?”: Faisal Saleh and the Palestinian Question Crossing the Venice Biennale

“ – – – – – – – – – “* *Gaza – No Words – See the Exhibit

Amid protests, tensions, and demonstrations, an official Biennale Arte 2026 Collateral Event exhibit transforms traditional Palestinian embroidery into a visual archive of Gaza.

Link to the Italian version on Artribune

As protests, diplomatic tensions, and symbolic clashes continue to unfold throughout the Giardini during Biennale Arte 2026, one of the most destabilizing exhibitions of the entire event does not belong to any official national pavilion. Positioned at the margins of the Biennale’s central exhibition system, it nevertheless challenges the relationship between image, politics, and moral responsibility more radically than many of the works occupying the institutional center.

The exhibition, “ – – – – – – – – – “* *Gaza – No Words – See the Exhibit, consists of one hundred works created through Tatreez, the ancient Palestinian embroidery technique traditionally passed down through generations of women and historically connected to traditional dress, family memory, and domestic life. Here, however, that language undergoes a complete transformation. It no longer serves decoration. It serves testimony.

The embroidered images reconstruct scenes drawn mostly from photographs coming out of Gaza over the past two and a half years: bodies wrapped in shrouds, killed children, mothers saying farewell to their sons and daughters before burial, bombed hospitals, erased families. The slowness of manual embroidery collides with the brutality of contemporary imagery, producing one of the strongest visual tensions encountered so far at the Biennale.

The project is curated by Faisal Saleh, artist and founder of the Palestine Museum US, who coordinated the work together with Palestinian embroiderers, transforming Tatreez into a tool of political archive and collective memory. Many visitors have already begun referring to it as “the real Palestinian Pavilion” of the Biennale.

Interview with the project’s curator, Faisal Saleh

Many visitors leave the exhibition deeply shaken. During our conversation, you yourself struggled to describe some of the works. What does it mean to live for months with these images?

I’ve been working on this project for about sixteen months. When you constantly look at this material, it inevitably gets inside you. It wears you down emotionally. Sometimes, when I try to explain certain images to people, I cannot even finish speaking. There are works here that are incredibly difficult to explain. How do you describe a father about to bury his daughter while continuing to stroke her braid for the last time? Or a woman holding the hands of her two dead daughters and kissing them before burial? It is all devastating.

You argue that the problem is not only what is happening in Gaza, but also the way Gaza is narrated or erased by Western media. Was this exhibition also conceived as a counter-narrative?

Absolutely. Art reaches people directly through the heart. We wanted to show what has happened because Western media refused to tell the story of Gaza properly. Some still continue to deny what we consider to be a genocide. Palestinians are rarely given the opportunity to tell their own story. Journalists are not allowed into Gaza, and those who are there are being killed. Many major international newspapers did not even mention this exhibition.

Many visitors describe this exhibition as the true Palestinian Pavilion of the Biennale. Is that a definition you accept?

The real question is another one: is it right for the Biennale to accept only pavilions from officially recognized states? I believe that is an unfair rule. There are peoples who deserve representation even without formal recognition. The Biennale should reconsider its criteria. Artistically speaking, this is practically the only exhibition at the Biennale directly addressing what is happening to Palestinians in Gaza.

In these days of protests and pro-Palestinian actions across Venice, have you felt supported by the wider network of artistic and activist initiatives surrounding the Biennale?

Not really. For example, I was not involved with ANGA, Art Not Genocide Alliance. They did not allow people like me to be involved in the organization. I spoke with some people, and they told me they would get back to me, but I never heard from them again. I still do not know exactly who is behind the organization. They are mostly curators, artists, and people working within the Biennale system itself. I find it difficult to understand why Palestinian voices like ours were excluded from that process.

Why do you think the contemporary art world avoids this subject so intensely?

Because nobody wants to truly confront the word genocide.

For the first time, Tatreez is being used in such an explicitly political way. Why was it important to transform this language?

In the past, Tatreez was mainly used for clothing and domestic objects. Here, instead, we transformed it into a way of telling the Palestinian story and constructing a collective memory. This is the first time it has been used in this political and documentary context.

At one point during the interview, Saleh spontaneously formulated what ultimately became the central theoretical question of the entire project:

“How do you curate a genocide?”

You yourself used this phrase during our conversation: “How do you curate a genocide?” What does it mean to find yourself in the position of having to curate an ongoing trauma artistically?

For me, this was the most difficult issue to confront. We are a major Palestinian art institution, and we felt a responsibility toward Palestine. But there is no manual explaining how to curate a genocide. Normally, curating means organizing ideas, building relationships between works, developing a theme. Here, instead, we had to understand how to confront something enormous, something that is still happening. In the end, we found a language through Tatreez. We wanted these works to force the world to face what it allowed to happen in Gaza. And we wanted them to become a demand for accountability and justice.

Will this collection remain as a permanent archive?

Yes. It will be preserved forever as historical testimony and evidence of what happened. We are also considering the creation of a Gaza Genocide Museum in the United States. We want future generations to study these works and understand what happened.

The Moral Limits of Contemporary Art

At Biennale Arte 2026 many works address conflict, trauma, identity, and memory. Yet few truly destabilize the relationship between aesthetics and moral responsibility as powerfully as this project curated by Faisal Saleh. Because the question left open by the exhibition is not only about Gaza. It concerns the very limits of contemporary art itself: understanding to what extent it is still capable of looking at violence without neutralizing it through language, distance, or the transformation of trauma into image.

“ – – – – – – – – – “*
*Gaza – No Words – See the Exhibit

European Cultural Centre Italy hosts the event at Palazzo Mora, Venice, Italy.

Open daily except Tuesday 10:00 – 18:00

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