Unfolding across multiple spaces around the small Portuguese city of Coimbra, this year's Anozero – Bienal de Coimbra has gathered artists and architects from around the world to engage, exchange and examine the concerns of today, from war and displacement to collective memory and cultural connection.
Several of the projects feature work by creators from the Middle East or subjects focused on the tragic events that have swept the region in the past decade 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 locations, gardens, public spaces and historic buildings in a citywide showcase, all connected by the curatorial theme To Hold, To Give, To Receive.
The theme uses the Proto-Indo-European root ghabh – the origin of the words “exhibition” and “habitat” – as a point of departure, exploring the gestures of reciprocity as a fundamental of both artistic practice and social life. The exhibition proposes 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 says.
“In Circulo Sereia, a few of our more politically charged works are on show. It began with the intensity and power of [Palestinian artist Taysir Batniji’s] artwork, and then we built on it as a theme for this particular venue, with the beautiful, bucolic vistas of the Botanical Gardens on the outside, and something a little more intense on the inside.”
Batniji’s Just in Case #2 is a series of about 250 photos of keys, drawing on testimonies from displaced Palestinians during the genocide of the past three years. The work uses the motif of the key as a persistent symbol of loss and forced exile.
Each photo documents a person who had to flee and had their home destroyed by Israeli bombardment in Gaza. Under 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 to send it to me via WhatsApp,” says Batniji. “Once I finished working on the project, I learnt 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 being so emotionally charged, there is also a clinical, detached tone to the work – a trauma response to feeling too much for too long – as though the series is merely documenting for posterity and letting the images speak for themselves.
Batniji’s work sits 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 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 includes 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 snap documents a protest in Tel Aviv before October 7, against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's judicial reform plans. A third shows 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 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 Forensic Architecture’s head of programmes Elizabeth Breiner.
“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 air strikes 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 weaponisation of evacuation orders and other ‘humanitarian’ measures to the conflation of civilians with terrorists – in this case, Hezbollah instead of Hamas,” Breiner says.
Elsewhere, at the Convento Sao Francisco – a 17th-century monks’ convent that now serves as a culture centre – 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, and serves as a poetic reflection on loss and preservation. It draws on photos of Raqqa’s lost artefacts and testimonies from the museum staff, some of whom were displaced to Portugal.
Acknowledging that these artefacts may be lost forever, Tabulo 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 artefacts, 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, favourite artefacts or important digs they took part in, and of course, the loss of this heritage.
The biennial acts as a sensitive and thoughtful platform to host such artworks, engaging in ways that let the works speak for themselves. Showing them in small clusters allows for space to breathe as viewers consider the works, rather than being overwhelmed by too much at once. The historic settings offer a poignant backdrop to the tragedies detailed in the Middle Eastern works, bringing a certain weight to stories that are becoming impossible to ignore.
