Mother Dough: The Slow Alchemy of Witnessing

Without collapsing these histories into equivalence, the exhibition holds them in tension, inviting us to listen to artistic practices as sites of witnessing on conditions designed to erase them. Borrowing the notion of mother dough as a method, the exhibition approaches art and the archive as living matter sustained through care, transmission, and persistence. 

Developed under fragmentation, interruption, and loss, the artworks presented here are not responses to the genocide alone, but part of an ongoing process of resistance: a slow fermentation of knowledge, memory, and form. We propose the slow alchemy of witnessing, not as passive observation, but as a political act: transforming what remains into forms that resist erasure. 

Across the exhibition, works emerge from fragments, absences, and unfinished gestures. They refuse closure. They refuse to disappear. Like mother dough, art remains alive through those who tend to it and those who carry it forward.

The curator of the exhibition is Carmel Alabbasi.

The exhibition is part of the Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum's contribution to the celebration of the friendship anniversary, Tromsø marks 25 years as a twin city with Gaza in 2026.