Betrayal is the title of this year’s Literature Festival in Bergen, and Kunsthall 3,14 was invited to curate a parallel program. For this occasion, we have chosen to present current works by Palestinian artists,  works produced during what humanitarian organisations, the UN, and scholars have described as the most devastating period in modern Palestinian history, particularly in Gaza.

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The scale of civilian loss, displacement, starvation, and the destruction of infrastructure has surpassed that of previous wars. Entire neighbourhoods, universities, hospitals, and cultural sites have been erased, and almost the entire population has been displaced. Journalists and media workers have been disproportionately targeted; more have been killed in this period than in any other conflict on record worldwide. On top of this, international reporters have largely been denied entry. In this reality, artists have become crucial witnesses. Their works carry the stories, textures, and voices that would otherwise remain invisible.

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The films are brought together to tell not only the stories within each work but also to remind us that pain and joy, despair and tenderness, always live side by side. In the midst of destruction, these artists continue to create. These are a few of many voices from Palestine insisting on seeing, listening, and making sense of the world that remains.

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In The Donkey of October 7th, Motaz Al Habbash and Mustafa Nabieh turn their gaze to one of Gaza’s most humble companions — the donkey — a quiet witness to the everyday life of survival, labour, and endurance. The film moves between absurdity and dignity, finding poetry in persistence.

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The Dahaleez Collective, working from within and beyond Gaza, presents It’s Not Easy, a deeply felt animation that reflects on forced displacement and the search for a space of safety. Through collective production, the film becomes both testimony and meditation on what it means to move, to speak, and to belong.

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Mohammed Jabaly’s The Stairs and Life Is Beautiful: A Letter to Gaza offer a broader human horizon — films that hold on to ordinary gestures of life and care, even in collapse. From Tromsø to Gaza, his camera searches for connection, showing how everyday acts of love and creation persist amid ruin — and giving us a glimpse of what it must be like to live abroad while one’s family, friends, and homeland endure a nightmare.

 

The Everyday After is curated by Gitte Sætre.

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Donkey of October 7th is produced in collaboration between Motaz Al Habbash, Mustafa Nabieh, and other artists working across Gaza and abroad, the film emerges from a collective effort to speak and create under extreme conditions.

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The film The Donkey of October 7th is a work that turns its gaze toward one of Gaza’s most humble and enduring figures — the donkey. Through this quiet presence, the film reflects on survival, endurance, and the absurdity of life amid destruction. As bombs fall and streets collapse, the donkey continues to carry, to walk, to exist — embodying both witness and companion in a landscape of loss. The film combines documentary fragments, artistic reflection, and poetic narration to reveal a space where the ordinary becomes sacred. It gives form to the persistence of life itself — to the fragile continuities that remain when everything else is stripped away.

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Kunsthall 3,14 will do a podcast episode with Motaz Al Habbash during this periode. Motaz is a Palestinian artist, producer, and curator residing in Norway. He primarily works with video and runs the mentoring program Here and There and the art and culture platform It is hard to be Arab. His current film project The Donkey of October 7th—in collaboration with Mustafa Nabieh—focuses on the situation of donkeys in Gaza. His work includes the installation Stolen Well (Qattan Foundation, Ramallah, 2024) and the seven-hour live program with Gazan artists Gaza (a)live (2016).

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It’s Not Easy produced by Dahaleez Collective is a short experimental animation that unfolds through a minimal visual language — simple lines and a white background. The work reflects the experience of forced displacement through both a personal and collective voice. It explores movement in two intertwined dimensions: the physical — displacement, stillness, and the search for grounding — and the linguistic — the flow and friction of words as carriers of memory. It’s Not Easy is a sensory and visual experience born of collective production, revealing the inner struggle and emotional turbulence of being uprooted from one’s place.

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Dahaleez was founded in 2021 as an artistic–research collective exploring how time and space shape the Palestinian experience under siege. Its first project, Geography of Divine Magic, presented at Beit Al-Ghussein in Gaza, marked the beginning of a shared practice grounded in contemplation, reinterpretation, and the production of knowledge from within lived experience. Since 2023, the collective has expanded through Transcending the Possible Future, a laboratory for collective reflection on the idea of futurity. This process led to a founding manifesto that continues to guide their artistic and research practice. Their ongoing project, Tabu, builds on this foundation through workshops and collective exercises that weave memory, testimony, and observation into forms of artistic expression.

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Dahaleez works to understand how structural violence and colonial systems shape Palestinian imagination — and how art might reassemble fragments of life into visions of liberation and renewal. Across disciplines and geographies, the six members collaborate through processes of dialogue, experimentation, and shared making.

In Palestine — and especially in Gaza — spaces of life are being destroyed, turning homes into ruins and streets into temporary shelters. Within this reality, the memory of place becomes a fragile common, where to remember is already to resist.

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Mohammed Jabaly is a Palestinian filmmaker and artist from Gaza, now based in Tromsø, Norway. His practice bridges personal testimony and collective memory, often moving between the intimate and the political.

He first gained international recognition with the award-winning documentary Ambulance (2016), a visceral and deeply human portrayal of life during the war on Gaza. The film — and the long bureaucratic struggle that followed his arrival in Norway — have profoundly shaped Jabaly’s work: a practice rooted in resilience, storytelling, and an unwavering belief in the human capacity for hope. His life motto, “Life is beautiful,” runs as a quiet thread through his films, even in times of total collapse.

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At Kunsthall 3,14, Jabaly presents Life is Beautiful: A Letter to Gaza, a film that continues his exploration of the beauty, loss, and defiant spirit of his hometown. His latest work, The Stairs (2025), will also be on view. The Stairs (original title Trappa) is a short documentary by Mohammed Jabaly and Eilif Bremer Landsend that follows some of the people who walk Tromsø’s Sherpa stairs — 1 ,203 steps carved into the mountain, each carrying its own story. The film observes these brief, everyday journeys as moments of human connection and reflection, weaving individual lives into the rhythm of the city’s landscapes.

Mohammed Jabaly films have received numerous awards and international acclaim for their honesty, compassion, and cinematic strength.

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Before being forced to leave Gaza, Jabaly was deeply engaged in community filmmaking and arts education. Today, he continues that commitment as manager of the Twin-City Project at Tvibit in Tromsø, fostering creative exchange between young artists across borders. Jabaly holds a B.A. in Film and Art from Nordland College of Art and Film and an M.A. in Fine Art from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts.

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