Portraits of Palestinian journalists killed in the bombings in Gaza are on display in Bologna

After Zaki, Gianluca Costantini remembers the 107 reporters who disappeared after 7 October. The exhibition "In the viewfinder of memory" will be inaugurated on June 12th at the Galleria Squadro

BOLOGNA – Ayat Khadoura was a Palestinian freelance journalist who shared videos and podcasts about the situation in Gaza on social media. She was killed with her family in their home in Beit Lahya, northern Gaza, during an Israeli air strike. Ahed Fatima was a photographer for the Egyptian editorial team of Al Qahera News TV, he was also killed during a bombing in Gaza. Khadoura and Fatima are two of the more than 100 journalists killed in the conflict that broke out in the Strip last October. And their portraits, together with 78 other drawings, will be exhibited in Bologna in an exhibition dedicated to the Palestinian journalists who were victims of the Gaza Strip, from 7 October to today.

All drawings are made by the artist Gianluca Costantini, whose style also immortalized the Egyptian student and activist Patrick Zaki, during his imprisonment in Cairo, La exhibition, entitled “In the viewfinder of memory“, will be inaugurated next Wednesday, June 12, at 7.30 pm in the Squadro art gallery. The exhibition is made up of 80 portraits created digitally, as well as four large original drawings, and can be visited until June 22nd. Some works, the organizers of the exhibition point out, have already been used in protest actions in Atlanta, New York, Berlin, Seattle and Naples to ask for a ceasefire.

In detail, as of May 28, 2024, at least 107 journalists have been killed in the conflict that broke out in October 2023, certified by the CPJ Committee to Protect Journalists: of the 107 journalists killed, 102 were Palestinians, 2 Israelis and 3 Lebanese. And again: 32 journalists were injured, two were missing and 38 were arrested. There are also reports of assaults, threats, online attacks, censorship and the killing of members of the reporters’ families as an intimidating message. 

“Since the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023 and Israel’s consecutive ruthless revenge – explain the organizers of the exhibition – Costantini has begun to portray journalists killed in the Gaza Strip. Actively collaborating with the CPJ Committee to Protect Journalists of New York has built a visual memorial day by day.” It is therefore also a “work in progress”. With these portraits, the artist wants to create “a votive offering, a gesture of care for the memory of those who are no longer here and who had chosen as their task in this land precisely that of remembering”.
In the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip, “an unprecedented peak” of journalists who have lost their lives has been reached, the organizers underline, “a sort of systematic extermination of the media” in the Palestinian territories. These themes will also be discussed at the inauguration of Costantini’s exhibition, in the presence of the sociologist Giovanni Boccia Artieri and Iustina Mocanu, head of Amnesty International > in Emilia-Romagna.