Ramallah Art Fair 2026: Narratives Under Occupation

Ramallah has long been a city where culture persists not despite reality, but through it. In its fifth edition, Ramallah Art Fair returns with a title that feels less like a theme and more like a lived truth: Narratives Under Occupation.

Taking place against the backdrop of two years of ongoing genocide in Gaza, the 2026 edition brings together forty-two artists from Palestine and the Golan Heights to reflect on what it means to create, remember, and imagine while living under sustained oppression.

This year’s fair is both an act of witnessing and an act of insistence. Across two sections — Contemporary and Rare — the artworks navigate displacement, loss, identity, memory, and the weight of everyday life under occupation, while also carving out space for resistance, resilience, and visions of a future beyond it.

In the Contemporary section, the urgency of the present is impossible to ignore. Works unfold as documents of survival, grief, and endurance. From Gaza, Maisara Baroud presents original pieces from his series I’m Still Alive, a body of work that captures the daily anguish of life under bombardment with raw immediacy. Sari Tarazi contributes striking photo montages composed from images taken during street demonstrations across Palestine protesting the ongoing genocide in Gaza, layering collective action with visual fragmentation.

Bashar Khalaf introduces a new body of work examining the devastating fire that tore through Ramallah’s main vegetable market, a blaze ignited during an Israeli military incursion when tear gas bombs reduced the space to ashes. The works move between documentation and mourning, bearing witness to how violence seeps into even the most ordinary sites of daily life.

Inass Yassin participates with two works, 100 Oranges in Yafa and Mohammad Returns Home. The latter depicts preparations for a welcome ceremony, with images of artworks appearing in the background; a quiet but devastating reference to absence. The work is dedicated to Palestinian artist Mohammad Alhaj from Gaza, whose artworks were lost beneath the rubble. Here, memory becomes both tribute and refusal to forget.

For the first time at Ramallah Art Fair, Noor Elshaer from the Golan Heights presents a series titled Tayyat (Folds). Her works explore the internal contradictions of motherhood through intimate daily rituals, such as folding scarves. These gestures become symbols of closeness, care, and the emotional weight carried within the seemingly mundane.

The Rare section, inaugurated last year and now firmly established, deepens the fair’s historical and cultural grounding. It brings together works by artists whose practices have shaped Palestinian and regional visual language across decades. A rarely shown lithograph by Syrian artist Burhan Karkutli depicts village life through his signature densely patterned compositions, where figures, animals, and motifs coexist like scenes from a collective story. A rare etching by Juliana Seraphim, an artist displaced in 1948, revisits themes of homeland, femininity, and memory through her surrealist lens.

Also on view are works by Vladimir Tamari, Laila Shawa, and Shafik Radwan; the latter having lost all of his artworks under the rubble of his home in Gaza. In this context, the Rare section does not function as nostalgia or archival distance, but as continuity. It asserts that Palestinian artistic production has always existed in dialogue with loss, exile, and perseverance.

Running until 29 March 2026, Ramallah Art Fair 2026 offers artworks at accessible prices, encouraging new collectors to engage with Palestinian art not as an abstract gesture of solidarity, but as a tangible act of support. More than a marketplace, the fair positions itself as a space of encounter, between generations, geographies, and lived realities.

Narratives Under Occupation does not attempt to soften its message. Instead, it insists on complexity, on presence, and on the necessity of art as both record and resistance. In Ramallah, creation remains an act of defiance, and of hope.

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