Gaza in bloom, from memory

On the third floor of their Gaza home, artists Mohammed Al-Hawajri and Dena Mattar kept a studio as an archive of decades of work, along with a charming garden open to the sky. Shelf after shelf of plants lined the walls of the rust-colored room: cactuses, aloes, and other succulents, all lush and green and alive. It was a place where the couple often welcomed fellow artists and foreign visitors. “New Forms of Survivance”11/7–12/5: Sat 2–7 PM or by appointment, Watershed Art & Ecology, 1821 S. Racine Since October 7, 2023, all of that has been destroyed. If you were an artist who lost everything—your home, your materials, your life’s work—could you keep creating? For the Palestinian artists in “New Forms of Survivance,” opening November 7, at Watershed Art & Ecology in Pilsen, the answer is a resounding yes. Curators Linda Abdullah and Faten Nastas Mitwasi borrowed the term “survivance,” first coined by scholar Gerald Vizenor, from North American Indigenous scholarship.

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