Raed Issa
On the Threshold of Silence
Born in the al-Breij refugee camp, in the heart of the Gaza Strip, Raed Issa is a contemporary artist who has transformed chronic precarity into language, loss into shared memory, and survival into a political act. Having grown up amidst rubble and sieges, he has been living in Gaza City with his wife and children, but in 2023 he had been a refugee in Deir al-Balah, where he worked and taught in a tent that became his studio. He finally decided to leave in September 2025 and he lost almost all his original artworks.
He grew up amidst the rubble of exile and the scars of siege. In this extreme context, his practice takes shape as a political act of survival, memory, and struggle.
His art is born amidst destruction, using makeshift materials: tea bags, medicine packaging, natural pigments, humanitarian aid wrappers. This is not only a response to scarcity but an aesthetic and political choice. Each work bears witness to a reality made of siege and deprivation, transforming ruin into narrative.
His works portray anonymous faces -women, men, children- suspended in a fractured time. They are not heroic icons, but fragile and resilient presences. Art thus becomes an archive of destruction, but also a form of care, memory, and resistance. A founder of the Palestinian Red Crescent’s Fine Arts Program and the Eltiqa collective, Issa helped create one of the few independent spaces for contemporary art in Gaza, which was destroyed by a bombing in December 2023. Since then, he has continued to teach in refugee camps, transforming tents into makeshift workshops.
His works have been exhibited in Palestine, Jordan, Australia, Switzerland and Ireland. At the Under Fire exhibition (Amman, 2024), he presented works made on materials from humanitarian aid packages. “These are the materials with which the world sees us,” he says. “As if we were only bodies to be cared for, not whole human beings.” In his “field studio,” Issa continued to create and now he looks for a way to return. Each work is an act of testimony and a call to responsibility. “Art”, he says, “is my language against erasure.”
© Elettra Stamboulis
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