Content Warning: This review contains language describing the genocide and ongoing violence in Palestine and incitement of violence against Palestinian people.
Every day since October, I have seen on my phone the worst things I’ve ever seen. These are photos mostly from Gaza, shared on social media, of Palestinians being bombed and brutalized; mothers cradling the lifeless bodies of their children; men and boys rounded up, stripped, bound and blindfolded; refugee camps on fire; hospitals exploded; babies starved. Just describing the images feels cruel — the acts themselves are unspeakable. Words are insufficient to convey them. But it is all happening. You have seen it too, this civilian reportage and documentation of Israel’s continuous devastation of Gaza after Hamas’ October 7 attacks.
These horrific scenes are daily reality for Palestinians. They are indecent and abhorrent scenes that go back through generations, and yet are also not the sum total of “the Palestinian experience” — no suffering or abuse is the sum total of a whole people’s existence. It is critical to hold onto that, and to hold the multiplicities.
These horrific scenes are daily reality for Palestinians. They are indecent and abhorrent scenes that go back through generations, and yet are also not the sum total of “the Palestinian experience” — no suffering or abuse is the sum total of a whole people’s existence. It is critical to hold onto that, and to hold the multiplicities. In a 2021 essay, around the time of “yet another round of Palestinian uprising against Israeli apartheid and its colonial war machine,” the poet and doctor Fady Joudah wrote about the challenges of exposure for Palestinian artists, in part because of Western audiences’ demand for performance. “The silken compassion toward Palestinians in mainstream English thinks the language of the oppressed is brilliant mostly when it teaches us about surviving massacres and enduring the degradation of checkpoints,” he writes.
The exhibition, curated by Quentin Gibeau at Area 405, features a family of Palestinian-American artists. The work of the artists/family unit — Zahi Khamis and Kim Jensen are the parents of Ahlam Khamis and Besan Khamis — is diverse in form and media, from painting and sculpture to installation, performance, and poetry, and is equally varied in subject and mood.
I was thinking about that Joudah essay, and the right to just exist and create a self-determined life, and the forces that (violently) infringe upon that right, before walking into “We Will Be What We Want to Be: From Baltimore to Palestine.” The exhibition, curated by Quentin Gibeau at Area 405, features a family of Palestinian-American artists. The work of the artists/family unit — Zahi Khamis and Kim Jensen are the parents of Ahlam Khamis and Besan Khamis — is diverse in form and media, from painting and sculpture to installation, performance, and poetry, and is equally varied in subject and mood.
The show’s title repeats the title of a large painting by Zahi Khamis, originally derived from a Mahmoud Darwish poem. Zahi’s 2024 acrylic painting, visible from the door, depicts a fractured, cubist scene of figures seemingly staged in a room, rendered in geometric shapes in optimistic morning sun colors: pale yellow and gold, numerous blues, sharp black, hot reds. Given the fragmented context and the purposeful absence of identifying features of a person or place, we focus instead on the massing of shapes that coalesce to form an individual and the power of their gathering together.
Nearby is Jensen’s “Watch in Full” installation, a “documentary poem” featuring cotton banners hanging mid-air in rows like laundry. Printed on the banners are photos from Gaza paired with poetic texts that capture the urgency of paying attention from afar, as well as the impossibility of swallowing all of it — watching South Africa argue its case before the International Court of Justice that Israel is committing genocide; attempting to rally people of a certain generation to care; feeling a visceral anger about it all, about “the number of children who will never be born / genetic codes that won’t travel on / trees that won’t sift the sun into smaller and smaller particles / the catalogue of things that can’t be counted / weddings / quarrels / couches / roses / limbs / books / rabbits …”
Meanwhile, a performance piece by Ahlam Khamis tests bystanders’ willingness to engage. Photo documentation of three iterations of “Under the Rocks,” performed in Los Angeles in 2011, Baltimore in 2021, and on UMBC’s campus in 2024, shows the artist or her collaborator lying beneath a pile of stones in busy public spaces. Accompanying text tells us that in L.A., a bystander screamed, “you are hijacking our space,” while others helped the artists carry and replace the stones after security officers had them move eight feet away. In Baltimore’s McKeldin Square, “most people scurried by without making eye contact.” In May of this year in a UMBC campus courtyard, many students walked by, “whispered and asked questions”; one “asked if it was a protest to nonstop school construction,” while another “thought it was about Gaza.” Three students helped remove the stones at the end of the performance.
In the same room, Besan Khamis presents a revised version of a 2016 piece, “Freedom Printer.” For the earlier piece, Besan painted a printer with the fishnet pattern of the Palestinian keffiyeh, and the printer printed sheets that read “freedom” in Arabic and English — a cheeky demonstration that if you can imagine freedom, you can create freedom. At Area 405, in Besan’s “Freedom Printer 2 (From Under the Rubble),” a fishnet-painted printer sits on a small mound of dusty rubble, surrounded by printouts of drawings made by children at the Nuseirat refugee camp in Gaza, which Israel bombed on June 8. “Freedom Printer 2” is a collaboration with Camps Breakerz, which the artist describes as a “breakdance crew in Gaza that continues to care for besieged youth by spreading dance, art, therapy, and much more, to people seeking shelter during this genocide.” Prints are available for purchase; all the money goes back to Camps Breakerz.
Since “We Will Be What We Want to Be” opened in late May, the exhibition has been further activated by several community events highlighting Palestinian culture, music, and more. The closing reception, this Friday, June 28, from 6 p.m. to 9:30 p.m., will feature remarks by Israeli human rights activist Miko Peled, a panel talk on art and resistance, and a performance by vocalist Nibal Malshi.
Acts of creation, like the dozens of artworks on display in this show and the supplementary programs bringing people into the space, strengthen bonds and affirm life at a time when that is desperately needed.
Acts of creation, like the dozens of artworks on display in this show and the supplementary programs bringing people into the space, strengthen bonds and affirm life at a time when that is desperately needed. Earlier in his 2021 essay, Joudah puts that sentiment into more beautiful language. “We sit at the shore of an acid sea lapping our being. The air we breathe is toxic. Even the wet sand corrodes our flesh,” he writes. “And yet we love, and love is, in the first place, common decency, and common decency is hard work. We carve light through impenetrable darkness. We, in the words of Gazan poet Hosam Maarouf, ‘manufacture spare hearts/ in case we lose the hearts each of us has.’”
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