Courtesy Gabrielle Bejani
On November 27, 2024, when Israel and Lebanon reached a ceasefire after months of armed violence across southern Lebanon, Gabrielle Bejani may have been hopeful, if briefly. But within hours of the announcement, the ceasefire was broken: Israeli soldiers opened fire in the town of Khiam, while Israeli military authorities claimed to be responding to violations by Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group. Shortly after, Bejani began creating a series of works that illustrated the grief, anger, and guilt she was experiencing as a Lebanese Palestinian artist.
“I didn’t know it at first, but slowly [the art] started creeping on me. It was instinctual. Vomiting is a bit of an ugly word, but it’s like that,” Bejani told ARTnews.
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Bejani’s maternal grandmother fled her ancestral home of Haifa less than two weeks before the Nakba, the violent displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948 during the establishment of Israel. She eventually settled in Beirut. Her parents later left Lebanon during the Civil War, and Bejani was born in Paris. She now lives in South London, though she visits Beirut and Paris often.
In her practice, Bejani works across painting, drawing, and collage to interrogate her gender, sexuality, and family history. For her latest series, however, watching the violence in Lebanon from afar spurred her to engage with the concept of land.
“How we live on land, what is ours, which parts of our land we can access,” Bejani explained.
While working on the series, she read the 57th issue of The Funambulist, a biannual French magazine that deals with the politics of space. It spoke of night as the time for revolutionary action. At the same time, Bejani reflected on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s description of Palestinians as “children of darkness,” with Israelis cast as the “children of light.” Darkness, for Palestine, was imposed as a metaphor for evil. Bejani sought to reclaim it instead as a source of identity and resistance.
“It was the idea that the imperial body needs light to control your body,” she said. Those who know their own land, she added, can operate in the dark.
“I used to be very averse to talking about my background or my family in my art; it was something I wanted to keep for myself. But when the genocide began, these thoughts became so loud that I couldn’t ignore them, and art became a tool for psychological survival,” Bejani said. “The way I interact with people and the way people in the West are perceiving me have changed so profoundly, it couldn’t not impact my art.”
The resultant exhibition, “Deliberate Dreams,” was held at Beirut’s Saleh Barakat Gallery in July. Through hazy nightscapes, each piece speaks to Bejani’s processing of armed violence, incorporating everyday cultural items like the bougainvillea on Beirut’s streets and 20th-century Lebanese postage stamps to communicate the preservation and protection of Lebanese-Palestinianness.
In the work Freedom Is a Place, for example, Bejani collages ink-soaked paper and uses watercolor to create a fragmented starry night sky. A small postage stamp from Lebanon’s Civil War is pasted into the sky-cum-abyss. The stamp is also an homage to her grandparents, who collected stamps throughout the war, which ran from 1975 to 1990.
“Statehood and nationality were things that were important to me when using these stamps,” Bejani said.
The title is also a nod to geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s concept of understanding liberation and abolition through physical space, arguing that freedom cannot be divorced from physical realities and cartographies. “There’s something very existential about it, but also aspirational—what I think we should have, what I think we ought to strive for,” she added.
The series, though rooted in liberatory thinking and “catalyzed” by Israel’s bombing of Lebanon, was never intended to be revolutionary. Instead, it was a way of processing grief, fear, and guilt, according to Bejani. “It’s not healing, it’s just contending with what’s happening,” she said.
The works are as locked into time as they are into place, communicating the ways in which Bejani worked through Lebanon under siege and Palestine under genocide in real time, with land itself as intrinsic to the work as the months between December 2024 and June 2025.
Also integral to the series was Palestinian writer Mohammed El-Kurd’s Perfect Victims, released in February. In it, El-Kurd questions why Palestinians must “prove their humanity,” arguing that they should not have to be acquiescent or pacifist to be deserving of life. Bejani weaves his writing into her own work, affirming that Deliberate Dreams is not meant as an exercise in “humanization.”
“There’s a tendency I had, that a lot of Arabs have, to be palatable and respectful, to be better than your oppressor,” Bejani said. “I was thinking of how tiring it is to hold this posture and didn’t want to make art that ‘humanizes’ us. I don’t want to beg for Western approval.”
There is anger, too, in the series. In This street, the air you’re breathing, the clouds and the sky, they’re all ours, Bejani overlays bougainvillea flowers picked from the streets of Beirut against inked figures walking slowly into the night, away from their land. The title is a quote a young Gazan girl shouted at Israeli soldiers in 2023.
Just as Bejani refused to create works for Western approval, she also refused a Western audience. Shortly after starting the series, she decided to exhibit in Beirut, despite being based between France and the UK. “For me, there is no way I was showing this in the West. It wasn’t directed towards a Western audience, even though I grew up in the West,” she said. “This is art for my people; they’re the ones who would understand.”
This past spring, fires engulfed the West Bank, displacing several communities and burning more than 6,000 acres of land. Many people online, according to Bejani, celebrated the fires as a “punishment” for Israel; she mourned instead. “I just saw it as our homeland burning,” she said.
Bejani has never been able to visit Haifa—where her maternal ancestors are from—or anywhere else in Palestine. She describes the land as a literal “holy place,” not for religious reasons but because of its deification among those who have been severed from it. This severance is definitional to Bejani’s work.
“I have a love for the land itself. It is phantasmagorical, it’s something we [Palestinians] read poetry about, it’s something that’s become our dream,” she said.
Ongoing warfare and strife in the region embedded themselves not only in the making of the work but also in its exhibition. Bejani’s initial flight to Beirut in June was canceled as Iran and Israel declared war on one another. When she finally arrived, she was reminded of being in Beirut in fall 2024, when 45 people were killed in an Israeli bombing of Dahieh, a suburb with more than 20,000 Palestinian refugees.
“We’re constantly living in a state of knowing danger is never far,” she said. “It’s weird to be in the city, buying things in the shops while the suburb is being bombed.”
Deliberate Dreams may be a product of Bejani processing genocide and displacement, but the violence that spurred its creation has not stopped. Neither has her sense of psychological trauma. In the weeks after the show closed, upon returning to London, Bejani found herself unable to forget the militarization of her homeland.
“Even now when I hear a buzzing sound, I find myself thinking it’s a drone for a fraction of a second before realizing it’s a plane or train,” she said. “I’m so privileged, but even I’m experiencing this distress and trauma.”
Alongside trauma, Bejani has experienced withdrawal from members of her London-based art community, attributing it to the discomfort words like genocide or colonialism stir up in those not impacted. Still, her work is inseparable from her identity as a Lebanese Palestinian.
“For the future, I want to make work on the link between anger and dignity. I want people to feel that expressing and allowing grief comes from a place of love. My work is about the love for our land and our people.”
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