Spanning multiple venues across the small Portuguese city of Coimbra, this year’s Anozero – Coimbra Biennial has brought together artists and architects from around the globe to engage, exchange, and examine contemporary concerns, ranging from war and displacement to collective memory and cultural connection.
Several projects showcase works by creators from the Middle East or focus on the tragic events that have swept the region over the past decade, viewed through the eyes of international artists.
Running until July 5 and co-curated by John Zeppetelli and Hans Ibelings, with assistant curator Daniel Madeira, the biennial unfolds across contemporary venues, gardens, public spaces, and historic buildings in a citywide exhibition, all connected by the curatorial theme “To Hold, To Give, To Receive.”
The theme utilizes the Proto-Indo-European root “ghabh” – the origin of the words “exhibition” and “habitat” – as its starting point, exploring gestures of reciprocity as fundamental to both artistic practice and social life. The exhibition posits the biennial itself as a form of shared space: a site of encounter where artworks, architecture, and audiences coexist and interact.
“The biennial becomes a space where artists and audiences enter into an ethical, intellectual, and emotional relationship. It is less an exhibition than a shared condition of attention and responsibility,” Zeppetelli states.
“At Círculo Sereia, some of our more politically charged works are on display. It began with the intensity and power of [Palestinian artist Taysir Batniji’s] artwork, and then we developed it as a theme for this particular venue, contrasting the beautiful, bucolic vistas of the Botanical Gardens outside with something a little more intense inside.”
Batniji’s “Just in Case #2” is a series of approximately 250 photos of keys, drawing on testimonies from displaced Palestinians during the genocide of the past three years. The work employs the motif of the key as a persistent symbol of loss and forced exile.
Each photo documents an individual who had to flee and whose home was destroyed by Israeli bombardment in Gaza. Beneath each photo, a handwritten note records the owner of the keys, the date and circumstances of displacement, the date of their home’s destruction, and their current situation.
“All these people were ordered by the Israeli army to leave their houses and move to other parts of Gaza, and their houses have been totally destroyed. Some lost family members. I started asking family, friends, and friends of friends to take a photo of their keys on a neutral background and send it to me via WhatsApp,” Batniji recounts. “Once I finished working on the project, I learned that many of them had been killed.”
“The captions are always to be written by hand in pencil – it makes it more personal and is also a comment on impermanence,” he adds. “I lost over 100 family members myself, and some of their keys are there too.”
Despite its emotional charge, the work also possesses a clinical, detached tone, as if the series is merely documenting for posterity and allowing the images to speak for themselves.
Batniji’s work is in dialogue with black-and-white photos of olive trees in Palestine by South African artist-activist Adam Broomberg and French photographer Rafael Gonzalez. “Anchor In The Landscape” is an ode to nearly one million centuries-old olive trees that Israel has purposefully destroyed, attempting to erase these symbols of resistance and connection to the land and identity.
The space also features German artist Thomas Demand’s photograph “Melonen,” which draws from an image of fake watermelons used to smuggle drugs, now repurposed as a charged symbol of Palestinian solidarity. Another photograph documents a protest in Tel Aviv before October 7, against Israeli Prime Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial reform plans. A third depicts a roadside memorial shrine.
Forensic Architecture’s videos “Three Days at Al-Azhar University: 28–30 January 2024” and “Death by a Thousand Cuts” are the final pieces in the space.
“Both works contend with the abuse of humanitarian measures by Israel in its genocidal campaign in Gaza, looking particularly at evacuation orders as a key mechanism for the permanent displacement of Palestinians there,” says Elizabeth Breiner, head of programmes at Forensic Architecture.
“Since October 2023, Israeli ‘warnings,’ ‘evacuation orders,’ ‘safe zones,’ and ‘safe corridors’ have enforced the displacement of Palestinians within the occupied Gaza Strip into areas that consistently lack the basic conditions for survival and are often themselves subsequently targeted.”
“In this investigation, Forensic Architecture followed the story of Nadia and Ahmad, a young couple from Beit Hanoun whose experiences offer an example of how supposed humanitarian measures like evacuation orders are actually experienced by people on the ground,” she adds. “And the way in which, despite their best efforts to comply with each order, the couple and later their families were nevertheless subjected to violence at every turn, be it airstrikes on the shelters they were taking refuge in or physical torture at the hands of Israeli soldiers.”
The second film comprises videos of evacuation pamphlets being airdropped over different areas in Gaza – impractical and performative – underscoring that these orders were never truly meant to be understood or serve a humanitarian function. The videos are part of FA’s wider “Cartography of Genocide” project, which documents the systematic destruction of life-sustaining conditions in Gaza.
“It is unfortunately all the more important to have an understanding of these patterns within Israeli military conduct, as we see them playing out now all over again in Lebanon, from the weaponization of evacuation orders and other ‘humanitarian’ measures to the conflation of civilians with terrorists – in this case, Hezbollah instead of Hamas,” Breiner states.
Elsewhere, at the Convento São Francisco – a 17th-century monks’ convent that now serves as a culture center – an installation by Portuguese artist Maria Trabulo acts as a tribute to Syria’s destroyed and looted Raqqa Museum.
“Se estas pedras falassem” (If These Stones Could Talk) is a specially commissioned sound and sculpture installation, serving as a poetic reflection on loss and preservation. It draws on photos of Raqqa’s lost artifacts and testimonies from the museum staff, some of whom were displaced to Portugal.
Acknowledging that these artifacts may be lost forever, Trabulo doesn’t try to create perfect replicas. Instead, she has 3D-printed a series of totems or “guardians,” which are surrealist amalgamations of many real artifacts, standing in a sea of rubble and broken pottery. The testimonies of the museum staff play from each sculpture, recounting their memories of the institution, favorite artifacts or important digs they took part in, and of course, the loss of this heritage.
The biennial serves as a sensitive and thoughtful platform to host such artworks, engaging in ways that allow the works to speak for themselves. Presenting them in small clusters provides space for viewers to contemplate the works without being overwhelmed. The historic settings offer a poignant backdrop to the tragedies detailed in the Middle Eastern works, lending significant weight to stories that are becoming impossible to ignore.
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