Gaza Biennale- Athens Pavilion

Nazeh’s Lexicon is an ongoing artistic work that explores displacement through language, memory, and the everyday vocabulary produced by forced movement. Emerging from the broader Nazeh project, the work gathers words, expressions, and spatial references connected to displacement from Gaza, tracing how violence transforms not only places but also the language through which people understand home, loss, survival, and return.
The lexicon functions as a counter-archive: a record of lived experience that resists the abstraction of displacement into statistics, maps, or political terminology. Through fragmented words and meanings, Nazeh’s Lexicon preserves the intimate, spatial, and emotional knowledge created amid destruction, while asking how language itself becomes a site of memory and resistance.

Nazeh’s Lexicon was presented in Art in the Line of Fire: Miracles amid Ruins, an exhibition dedicated to the resilience of Palestinian art in the face of ongoing violence and to the role of artistic practice in sustaining and rebuilding Palestinian cultural identity. The exhibition included the Athens Pavilion of the Gaza Biennale and is curated by art historian Faye Tzanetoulakou and Dimitris Sarafianos, Director of Lofos Art Project. The work was installed on 17 September 2025, with the exhibition opening on 18 September 2025, at Lofos Art Project, 39 Velvendou Street, Athens, Greece.