Artist Shereen Abdel Karim and Gaza’s memory against erasure

Artist Shereen Abdel Karim and Gaza’s memory against erasure newspress_en Wed, 07/08/2026 - 06:00 Culture & Social Affairs In Gaza’s altered reality, a familiar question returns with renewed force: is a city an architectural construct whose solidity can still be relied upon, or is it, rather, the distilled essence of human presence shaped gradually over time? War—alongside the violent transformations it has wrought—has profoundly reshaped the Palestinian relationship with place. Belonging now appears more firmly anchored in memory than in physical presence within the city itself. From this premise emerges The Face of the City by Palestinian artist and architect Shereen Abdel Karim. She approaches place as something that exceeds its built form, becoming a layered repository of accumulated memory and human experience. In her conception, place is not merely a constellation of buildings and streets; it is a web of stories, relationships and moments woven across time. Funded by the A. M. Qattan Foundation, the project gathers old photographs of Gaza from its visual archive and reassembles them within an artistic frame that offers an alternative to the present image of devastation. It restores the memory of Gazans and their daily encounters with the city’s structures: the slogans once written on its walls, the shop signs, the painted façades, the commercial storefronts, and institutions that shaped everyday life. Through these fragments, Abdel Karim seeks to reinsert the human trace into the city’s fabric. At least 73,066 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since 7 October 2023. According to the UN, approximately 81% of all structures in the strip have been damaged, including 123,464 that have been destroyed. More than 76% of the enclave’s housing has been reduced to ruins, leaving an estimated 61 million tonnes of rubble. The question of place “The war radically changed my relationship with the city,” says Abdel Karim, whose interdisciplinary practice explores the relationship between urban space, memory, and visual storytelling. “The city is no longer the fixed reference to which I always returned. It has become something in constant flux. Perhaps my sense of belonging is now attached to the memory of the place more than to the place itself.” Palestinians working on a UN rubble management project in Khan Younis on 15 December 2025. In this transformation, the city has come to resemble a labyrinth, where everything invites bewilderment and a sombre kind of reflection. A bitter awareness of memory’s collapse has deepened, leaving the individual in a ceaseless attempt to hold on to what slips away, as though the fragility of place intensifies the need to anchor it to the walls of memory. In The Face of the City , the photographic image acquires a function beyond conventional documentation. It is no longer simply a record of a moment; it becomes an attempt to secure what may disappear. “For me, the image is not merely documentation. It is an attempt to fix a moment that may later be lost. I know that this place and this moment may vanish with time, as though the image were resisting forgetting.” To understand the image in this way is to raise a broader question about the very possibility of preserving the city. Can place truly be held, or is only its trace preserved? “There is a strange contradiction within me,” she explains. “Are we truly able to preserve the place, or do we only preserve its shadow and its memory? “My physical presence in Gaza is no longer enough to prove my relationship with it. I find myself in a constant attempt to preserve my memory within this place, where what I fear is not so much the loss of the location as the loss of the stories, feelings, and experiences that bind me to it.” What goes unnoticed Abdel Karim’s approach is rooted in an architectural background that has shaped how she sees the city. Her training gave her a particular sensitivity to space, to the relationships between urban masses and materials, and the formation of the urban fabric. “When I walk down the street,” she says, “I notice details that others may not see, and I think about how the place was formed, about its structure, and about the many events that connect me to it.” Yet this perspective, for all its importance, is no longer sufficient on its own to understand the city. Architecture, as she suggests, opens questions that move in different directions—between place as a material condition and the artistic gaze as a human narrative. “The architectural gaze used to make me ask: how was this place built? What is the relationship between its elements? The artistic gaze made me ask: how did people live in it? How many years did they spend here? Why did they cling to it for so long?” The project focuses on details that do not appear in geometric formations, yet speak to the way life inhabits place and to the emotional bond that forms between human beings and their surroundings. A young Gazan jumps off a surfboard on 21 June 2026, with Gaza City behind him. “There are small particulars that do not appear in architectural plans,” she explains. “You find them in the light on the wall, in the trace of use, and in people’s relationship with their homes. These are the elements that give a place its soul.” Thus, place ceases to be merely a material structure; it becomes the residue of an entire life lived within it. Different experiences Yet the city Abdel Karim works on is not a single city. By collecting testimonies from residents who had lived in the same places, she found that each person carries a city of their own, and that the same place can hold an inexhaustible number of images and memories. “What captivated me most was the multiplicity of narratives. Each person lived a different experience, even in the same place. Each carried a distinct memory and a different view of the place.” This multiplicity led her to reject the idea of a single narrative or definitive truth about the city. Instead, she came to see these accounts as fragments that, when layered together, begin to form a portrait of the city. “I did not try to choose one narrative and consider it the truth,” she says. “On the contrary, I worked with the accumulation between them, as though they were layers.” Houssam Marouf As war continues to erase the physical landscape of Gaza, the Palestinian artist turns to photography, testimony, and digital media to preserve the city’s human fabric Palestinian youth retrieve books from the rubble of a mosque and buildings which collapsed during Israeli bombardment around the town city of Rafah southern Gaza Strip on 24 January 2024. Gaza in ruin: lost deeds muddle proof of ownership In Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, homes did more than burn… Palestinians walk past a destroyed building at a makeshift market in the Nuseirat refugee camp, located in the central Gaza Strip, on October 15, 2025, two days after a ceasefire came into effect. The destruction of Gaza’s markets is the destruction of memory Before the war, Gaza’s traditional markets were much more… Architects at Venice Biennale challenge Israel’s culture of erasure Architects at Venice Biennale challenge Israel’s culture of erasure In the first week of Israel’s assault on Gaza, 22 members… Palestinian artists paint a mural depicting the "Global Resilience Flotilla" in Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip, on 3 October 2025. Fleeing Gaza: artists open up about survivors' guilt The departure of Palestinian creatives from Gaza has led… Gaza Gaza war destruction artist 08 July , 2026 Region MENA What captivated me most was the multiplicity of narratives. Each person lived a different experience, even in the same place. Each carried a distinct memory and a different view of the place Palestinian artist and architect Shereen Abdel Karim She adds: "I began to see the city as layers of memory. These layers may contradict one another, yet this contradiction is what gives them their human truth." In this conception, the city is not reduced to a unified narrative. It is understood as a permanent plurality, formed through the interweaving of voices and experiences. In Abdel Karim's project, Gaza becomes a narrative space grounded in multiplicity and divergent points of view. In the Gazan context in particular, this multiplicity acquires greater urgency. As the war continues and the city's features change, memory itself becomes vulnerable to erosion alongside the erosion of place. For this reason, Abdel Karim refuses to see art as an aesthetic practice or a personal luxury, but rather as a necessity. This necessity arises from a reality in which places are exposed to disappearance, along with the documents that record them and, at times, even the people who carry their stories. Yet art, in this context, does not serve as a substitute for the official archive. It works on a different plane. It preserves not only the facts but also the feelings attached to them. "Art preserves people's feelings, attitudes and temperaments," she says. "It is the vessel that carries the daily details and the small and large stories that reflect the city as it was lived." The witness and the memory In this sense, art becomes both witness and memory, seeking to preserve not only the manner in which events occur, but also the way they are reflected in people's lives. "Art in Gaza," Abdel Karim notes, "has come to perform a double role: bearing witness to what is happening on the one hand, and preserving the memory of the city on the other. When places are subjected to destruction, narratives become threatened with loss, and the role of art is to preserve the trace and keep it alive." A Palestinian man walks in Gaza City past a poster hung on a shop reading in Arabic "strike" in protest against the siege on Gaza and the economic situation, on 22 January 2018. The Face of the City is therefore a fusion of emotion, documentary inquiry, and artistic vision. "I am in a composite state between art and documentation," says Abdel Karim. "I am living through an immediate experience that has not yet reached its end." The project's raw materials—images, testimonies, oral narratives, and data—become the starting point for a new engagement with place in its altered form. "This is the artist's craft in shaping meaning as it changes with the world. Truth gives me the tools I work with, but art intervenes in the way they appear and the way they are presented." This fusion of documentation and art leads her towards contemporary media, including video, virtual reality, and digital technologies, which she sees as new tools of narration. In a world where narratives are constantly contested, Abdel Karim believes that producing an independent Palestinian narrative has become a necessity rather than a choice. "We must work with contemporary media to create new ways of confronting the narratives produced against the Palestinian narrative. We should not wait for others to tell our story. We must produce it ourselves, from within." In her view, these media do more than represent experience—they convey it, carrying with them its sense of time, sound, movement, and emotion. "Media have made it possible to carry place from Gaza to the outside, beyond geographical borders, bearing sound, time and movement." In this way, the artwork becomes capable of travelling across contexts and taking on new forms while preserving its experiential density. How is the future formed? As for the future, the project returns repeatedly to memory in an attempt to recover an architecture that has been entirely obliterated, along with the human fabric that once gave it life. For Abdel Karim, Gaza's future does not begin with the reconstruction of buildings alone. It also requires asking what becomes of the people and the feelings bound up in all of this. Palestinians gather on a street in Nuseirat in the central Gaza Strip on October 10, 2025. "Before rebuilding stone in Gaza, we must rebuild a shared memory for ourselves. I am searching for a way to reshape collective awareness of place and of what we have lost from it. Perhaps art is the bridge between what we have lost and what can be formed again." Between a city in constant change and a memory striving to hold on to it, The Face of the City takes shape as an attempt to preserve the meaning of place at a moment when rapid transformations threaten to dismantle it. Gaza, as an image subjected to erasure, has become at once a subject of research, documentation, and artistic inquiry. It confronts the individual with the prospect of losing memory and voice—and perhaps even the last trace of existence—while compelling them to search for new ways of recovering the past. 08 July , 2026 story cover Off Label No label Promotion Article Off Show on issuepdf page Off