Photographs by Joss Dray
(A tour within the political and sociocultural context of the occupied land and diaspora)
With Dr. Saleh Abdel Jawad

Wednesday, April 9 | 12:00
Language: Arabic

Dr. Saleh Abdel Jawad leads us on a visual and intellectual tour of the "With My Own Eyes" exhibition by French photographer Joss Dray, who describes herself as the "Resistance Photographer". Dr. Abdel Jawad and Dray share a deep personal connection; he accompanied her during her time in Palestine and introduced her to many Palestinian families, allowing her to get closer to the lived experiences of people under occupation.

In this tour, we will not simply view the photographs, but read and analyze them within their broader historical, social, and political context, retrieving from them pivotal moments in the history of Palestinian resistance and contemplating the narratives they carry—narratives that defy erasure and forgetting.

About the Exhibition

"With My Own Eyes" invites us to delve into the living timeline of Palestine through the lens of French photographer Joss Dray. At a time when standing with Palestine was considered professional suicide, Dray dared to document the atrocities of the occupation and follow the Palestinian resistance across the occupied land and the refugee camps in Lebanon—from the Sabra and Shatila massacre, through the First Intifada, to Oslo and the Second Intifada.

In the Palestinian context, documenting through sound and image was not always an option, leaving our story vulnerable to distortion, erasure, and denial—starting with the first displacement, when survival took precedence over documentation. Amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the scenes on the ground resemble horror films. Yet for Palestinians, they are a repetition of a past that remained blurred, except for fragments of oral histories that once felt like fiction. Every image, every cry, every shrouded body, every southern displacement, and every tented exile tells a story we may not have seen but know by heart.

Palestine is not a single tragic narrative, but a temporal tapestry interwoven with millions of personal and collective stories shaped by resistance, and by a life both painful and inspiring. This exhibition is not merely a collection of photographs; it is a living archive of the entangled relationship between past and present, helping us reimagine both memory and future—as Ghassan Kanafani said, in a cycle that "does not begin except to end, and does not end except to continue".