Oraib Toukan’s program, like the majority of her films, opens with a citation: “Featuring the voice of Gaza-based artist Salman Nawati.” These words situate the audience, orienting towards a geography that the films themselves inhabit but rarely depict outright. Our eyes will be pinched into digital files, scraping across pixels and between film frames while being punctured by the clear testimony of Palestinian voices. These are voices that describe, coming from bodies bearing witness to a violence that no image can fully contain. Such are the woven elements of these works, where a located voice never allows dislocated images to vanish into contemporary art’s depoliticized aesthetics or into the assumed benevolent gaze of documentary practice. These are works that force the viewer to listen, all the while questioning what it means to truly see. After all, as Toukan reminds us, decades of images emerging from Palestine have failed to compel the West to stop propping up Israeli settler-colonialism: “What exactly can’t you see in what I am seeing? (or, put another way: What the fuck can’t you see in this?)”¹.

The three works selected for this program, Offing (27 min, 2021), Via Dolorosa (20 min, 2021), and When Things Occur (28 min, 2016), are dense, durational experiences that intervene in the digital scroll of cruel images, establishing a condition that cannot be ignored or swiped away. These works are spare and precise, with stark cuts, long shots, and careful looking––sometimes at nothing at all. They move through the world, through the representation of Palestinian resilience, and the relentless punishment unleashed upon that resilience. Turning against the legible primacy of the image, the rhythm of testimony here controls the pace of seeing, where the slow time of looming violence meets the immovable duration of Palestinian steadfastness.

In Offing, crisp video collapses with degraded files sent via messaging apps during the 2021 siege on Gaza. We hear, as cited, from Salman Nawati’s voice that the night is the worst time during a siege. That you can close your eyes but you cannot turn off your ears. Written across a phone screen, a message appears: “I couldn’t raise my hand for the image but I took the sound––you can hear.” The film then drops us into a digital black void, where we can only listen to the violent concussion of a bomb, of screaming, of terror.

Often, the cut of the edit is done away with altogether. In one shot, over two-minutes long, we see the back of a picture frame. When it is flipped over, we see Yasser Arafat, former revolutionary turned Oslo Accord-signing diplomat. Flipped over again, a framed portrait of current Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas is placed on top. We watch the face that formerly led a liberation movement being plastic wrapped to its complicit, policing inverse. As the film concludes, another citation places the images themselves into exile: “All materials filmed outside Gaza.”

In Via Dolorosa, we shift from digital video to the celluloid film archive of the Palestinian Film Unit (PFU), the revolutionary organization that linked image-making to decolonial struggle. We immediately see the risk of engaging in such a project, opening with the final filmed images of PFU member Hani Jawharieh’s life, moments before he was struck and killed by an Israeli shell. Another voice, this time of feminist literary and film scholar Nadia Yaqub, tells us that Palestinian resistance has always understood that it is not enough for the image to simply exist and expect it to speak for itself. Tied to a political project, a context, a demand, the PFU transcended the neutral form of documentary and Western journalism, turning image-making into a collective project of self-representation. Israel’s systemic targeting, confiscation, and destruction of these images, as well as those who made them, only strengthen the threat they pose to delegitimize its settler colonial project. These images, rescued here by Oraib Toukan with her collaborator Ala Younis from former Soviet cultural centres in Amman, emerge once again as both model and stark warning for citizen journalism that would later bear witness to the systemic, genocidal siege on Gaza decades later.

In When Things Occur, we return to Gaza in the wake of the 2014 siege, which killed more than 2000 Palestinians. Moving again past the legible, we are pushed right up against the grid underlying the square pixels of digital images. This work zooms into a systemic structure that shapes how Palestinian suffering is depicted and how these images circulate within decontextualized Western media coverage. Intertwined with the voices of Gaza’s citizen photographers and journalists, this digital grid–often unseen but always present–lurks like another form of colonial violence. It is a line drawn through the undulating landscape of Palestine. It becomes the repeating timeline of siege-after-siege inflicted on Gaza: in 2008, in 2012, in 2014, in 2021, in 2023, and in 2025, as you read this.

Oraib Toukan’s work, for all its stark formal analysis and image deconstruction, is at once filled with emotion, with affect, with life. At key moments, we are left alone to fill in the gaps of understanding open-ended images: an animatronic dinosaur; a spinning amusement park ride; flies sucking on the tears of a horse’s eye; laughter when the Skype call drops away; the vastness of the sea. “And so, enter desire,” writes Toukan in her essay Twenty-One Sunsets. “Desire to attain what the mind pictures. The right to desire. The desire for dignity. Knowing that pictures of suffering may have a claim etched somewhere deep inside them for an equal right to joy. The joy of smelling, touching, knowing, too, that someone or something that is absolutely not within reach.”²

In all the power of these voices from Gaza, these three works also act as a haunting. After each of them were made, this violence only multiplied exponentially, proliferating across phones again, and again. The warning is here. The evidence is here. The tools to see it are here. Yet, here we are, witnessing Israel kill Palestinians while the world remains silent and complicit. We must take the warnings of these films and turn them into action, until the day Palestinian desire and joy permanently breaks the colonizer’s grid.