“To omit Palestine is a political act.”
These words, drawn from a public statement by Montreal-based film collective Regards Palestiniens, call out the 2025 edition of the Biennale d’art contemporain, In Praise of the Missing Image. On its website, the Biennale boasts that its diverse programming, which seeks to “amplify emancipatory voices” and invite reflection on “gaps in individual and collective memory,” features works by Canadian and international artists from a vast array of countries, provinces, and communities. Yet in both the programming and the curatorial statement, Palestine is distinctly absent.
This flagrant exclusion is what inspired the Regards Palestiniens’ counter-screening, The Missing Image Is: Gaza. On the crisp evening of Tuesday, Sept. 16, over 100 people gathered with camping chairs, blankets, and keffiyehs in the parking lot across from articule Gallery. The 65-minute program “seeks to restore meaning” to the Biennale’s title, originally drawn from Rithy Panh’s film The Missing Picture about the Cambodian genocide and Khmer Rouge regime.
The first screening and the most recent of the four films, Firas Shehadeh’s Final Hour Log – Handala, firmly asserts the theme’s pertinence. Using mostly livestream footage, Shehadeh reconstructs the final hour of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition’s civilian vessel Handala before it was seized by the Israeli Navy on July 26, 2025. A rapid escalation follows as, within minutes, the team scrambles to hide their memory cards and raise their hands in a display of peace. Nonetheless, Israeli naval officers storm the vessel, and one turns off the CCTV camera that was livestreaming. The film understands the power of images—the importance of “preserving what was meant to be erased,” as the website states.
Footage in the other three films spans seven decades, weaving together a spectrum of time and experience in Palestine. The steady current through all of them, though, is the dualism of Palestinian life. Sweet scenes of children and family are cast against a plea for help recorded after the Shuja’iyah massacre in Hadeel Assali’s Shuja’iyah: Land of the Brave. Sunny shores of Gaza peppered with flowers contrast a thoughtful reflection on the role of televised media in Oraib Toukan’s Offing. The personal and the political become inextricable as a frantic mother mourns her home destroyed by bombing in Mustafa Abu Ali’s Scenes of the Occupation from Gaza.
The Regards Palestiniens counter-screening thus begs the question: Are images of Gaza actually missing, or just ignored? While social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook continue to systematically censor Palestinian content, since Oct. 7, some Palestinian creators have broken through the algorithm, documenting their stories and struggles on their own terms. The fact that images and stories from Palestine now permeate far beyond social media is a testament to the unwavering determination of these journalists, whose voices have successfully drawn Palestine into the international limelight. The same day as the Regards Palestiniens screening, a UN Commission found that Israel is committing genocide in the Gaza Strip.
In the social media age, it’s less likely that images of suffering are totally missing and more often that they are short-lived or turned into spectacle in the popular consciousness and ignored by actors capable of enacting real change.
The Missing Image Is: Gaza is acutely and solemnly aware of this because it is precisely what makes the Biennale’s exclusion of Palestine really bite. “This exclusion is not accidental but the result of deliberate curatorial silence,” insists the Regards Palestinians team in their statement. Art has the potential to reach broad audiences and the power to introduce and elevate new perspectives. When exhibitions adopt radical aesthetics, they must earnestly believe in and bravely commit to them.
