Multidisciplinary artist Ash Moniz has turned art-making into aid relief for Gaza. Shortly after the Israeli offensive in October 2023, they launched a mutual aid network out of New York City to support families affected by the genocide. But backing for the initiative was scarce — on a good week, they collected around US$1000 in donations. When Moniz received an invitation from the Shanghai-based Rockbund Art Museum for a mid-career retrospective — one that came with a large commissioning budget for a new work — they thought, what is the point of making art during a genocide? How can the funds be redirected? It didn’t take much to convince curator and museum director X Zhu-Nowell to donate the majority of the commissioning budget to aid relief in Gaza in response to the urgency of the moment — and to consider the donation itself the artwork.
How might we understand the conditions under which Moniz could persuade a museum to reconfigure a production budget into an act of solidarity? What does a museum that operates within formal financial networks gain by colliding with the precarious economy of survival in Gaza? What happens to an institution that gives form to our yearnings?
Can museums really feel with us?
Recalling recent debates around Cameron Rowland’s Flag (2025) — an artwork that consisted of replacing the French flag on the facade of the Palais de Tokyo, in Paris, with that of Martinique, and which was briefly on view before it was deemed illegal under French law and taken down; the haunting presence of an artwork that has been sacrificed acts as an invitation to reconsider the social responsibility of cultural institutions, and cultural practices, within our current contexts.
With museums navigating increased public scrutiny and state pressure — risking budget cuts, reputational backclash or censorship depending on their social and political context — can art move beyond translating catastrophe into an aesthetic or dialectical object for consumption?
We’ve known Moniz as an artist whose work confronts the extractive logic of representation in late capitalism. Since 2019, their practice across video, performance and installation has involved extensive field research investigating the structural power of workers in supply-chain logistics — sites where the uneven flow of goods, capital and bodies can be interrupted to negotiate social or political solidarity. They usually embed with dock workers, living aboard container ships for extended periods of time: at the port of Beirut, where they imagined swarms of dragonflies as witnesses to labor exploitation (2019); at the port of Sokhna, where they created a fictional commercial for a forensic camera documenting the “crime” of workers going on strike (2020); and in dialogue with legal experts, speculating on the (im)possible implications of applying the law of the sea on land (2021). Drawing on the social organizing tactics of unionized workers, Moniz examines, across these works, acts of interruption, delay, silence, inefficiency and absence as active forms of resistance.
Installation view, Ash Moniz, A Crack in the Shape of Light Getting In, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, May 2–September 28, 2025. © Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai. Photo: Yan Tao
Set against this long-standing engagement with the politics of absence, Moniz’s first survey exhibition in Asia, A Crack in the Shape of Light Getting In, which ran from May to September 2025, centered on two newly commissioned artworks for their intimate involvement with Gazans: Just Tell Them It’s an Artwork, an installation comprising a 20-meter long void corridor and a museum sign that read: “The outline of an empty space where a large-scale installation could have been. Instead of making this installation, the US$30,000 set aside by the museum for its production was sent by the artist to families in Gaza for their survival during this ongoing famine and genocide.”
The exhibition’s second anchor, [Inaudible], a video installation co-directed with Gaza-based rock band Osprey V was post-produced by Berlin-based filmmaker Mariam Mekiwi. The video follows the band as they navigate producing a music video for their latest track amid the precarity of life in Gaza.
Video still, [Inaudible], 2025, color video, with sound, 17 min., 12 sec. Commissioned by the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai. © Ash Moniz. Courtesy of the artist
Gaza-born rock band, Osprey V, takes its name from a bird of prey known to survive across some of the harshest environments globally. With a moniker evoking resilience under extreme conditions, the band was formed by self-taught musicians and cousins Raji, Saed and Momen al-Jaru, along with Siraj Shawa, in 2013 — a time when finding an electric guitar for sale in Gaza was still impossible. They taught themselves to play on instruments their cousins brought into the strip from abroad by watching Youtube videos of their favorite rock bands. Over a decade later, the band has garnered worldwide fame among rockheads. They blend Nu metal and Alternative rock (think: Linkin Park meets a politically conscious Roger Waters), often singing in English telling stories of survival, reflecting daily life under siege in Gaza.
Osprey V released its latest track, Angels Kneel recently. Written and composed during the genocide, the track’s release had been postponed due to displacement, and the bombing of most of Gaza’s sound recording studios. With the incessant, cold, grinding wartime noise filling the air, finding the silence needed to record the track became increasingly risky with the systematic bombing of Gaza’s neighborhoods.
As they risk their lives to record the music video, Osprey V offers a lens that makes palpable the structural vulnerabilities of daily life under displacement, bombing and siege. The music video, a staple of late modernity in western culture, is being made here, against all odds. Through Osprey V, we see a Gaza that pulsates — is alive, inspired.
This is war, in its full, unforgiving reality, permeating daily life. When most of the al-Jaru cousins evacuated, reuniting in Jordan, last September 2025 the track was finally mixed and recorded. Of the bandmates, only Momen, the band’s bassist, remains in Gaza.
The music video for Angels Kneel was directed by late filmmaker and photojournalist Ismail Abu Hatab, with late artist Franz al-Salmi as art director.
A few weeks after filming, both Abu Hatab and Salmi were killed in Israel’s bombing of al-Baqa Cafe, in late June 2025. The strike on the beachfront coffeeshop — which was one of the few remaining public refuges for journalists, artists and youth looking for internet, electricity and any semblance of normalcy — killed dozens, turning a rare pocket of ordinary life into yet another scene of destruction.
Angels Kneel is dedicated to Abu Hatab and Salmi, and to Palestinian martyrs and what they carried away with them.
For an artist, the question thus circles back: what is the point of making art in this context, if art serves merely to enter into a dialectical dialogue or offer commentary on the aesthetic plane? For Moniz, the answer might be in the relational dimension of cultural production — a mode of expression grounded not in detached representation but in proximity, collective memory and embodied experience.
Soon after the opening of the exhibition in Shanghai, Moniz traveled to Cairo to distribute the US$30,000 donation. We spent an afternoon talking about their work and how they managed to persuade the museum to reconfigure its production budget into an act of solidarity. Their question — what is the point of making art during a genocide? — echoed a sense of moral outrage we had heard expressed by other artists in the current heated context. Photographer Nan Goldin, who has historically refused to separate her artistic practice from her social activism, also spoke publicly about her inability to produce work in the wake of Israel’s operations in Gaza and Lebanon, at the opening of her solo show This Will Not End Well, at the National Gallery of Berlin (2024).
As theorist Susan Buck-Morss reminds us, the aestheticization of war is a dangerous terrain. Both Moniz and Goldin seem to immerse themselves in direct action, rather than material production, when witnessing events that eradicate entire communities.
In the 2022 documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, directed by Laura Poitras (Citizenfour; My Country, My Country), Goldin takes on the billionaire Sackler family, whose company, Purdue Pharma, manufactured the highly addictive painkiller OxyContin— a pharmaceutical drug widely linked to the opioid epidemic in the United States that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. The Sacklers, as Goldin uncovered, were also major funders of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Tate and National Portrait Gallery in London, and the Louvre in Paris, among others worldwide. Goldin had spoken publicly about developing an addiction after being prescribed OxyContin herself following surgery, and managed to leverage her position in the art world to hold the Sacklers publicly accountable.
In 2018, she and activists from her group PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) staged a protest inside the Met’s Sackler Wing, which houses the Egyptian Temple of Dendur — scattering fake OxyContin pill bottles into the reflecting pool and staging a “die-in.” Goldin’s activism, along with sustained public pressure, led the Met museum to announce in December 2021 that it would remove the Sackler name from 7 exhibition spaces, including the wing housing the Temple of Dendur.
Museums have long been spaces of cultural confrontation. Some artists consider them sites of contestation, and a few succeed in leveraging their artistic and social capital toward institutional impact. With Just Tell Them It’s an Artwork, Moniz turned the museum’s commissioning budget into a direct material intervention: the transfer of funds into the precarious, informal economy of survival in Gaza.
It was simple — perhaps too simple. No questions asked, no further bureaucratic processes. The donation was transferred in US dollars from Shanghai, dispatched in Cairo, converted into cryptocurrency in Europe and delivered in US dollars in Gaza. Of the US$30,000 donation — after passing through several brokers — only a portion would reach families in Mawasi, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat and the north of Gaza.
The (non)work was made visible in the museum only through its own absence: an empty space delineated with tape, a museum sign and a wall caption. It recalls a lineage of immaterial or dematerialized art: Goldin & Senneby’s Eternal Employment (2019) set aside a budget to hire a single person for life, without defined duties, reframing wage labor itself as the artwork. Cameron Rowland’s Plot (2016) used an exhibition budget to lease a plot of land under restrictive terms, rendering the legal contract the central piece in the exhibit. Yves Klein’s exhibition Le Vide (1958) presented nothing but whitewashed walls and an empty vitrine, which the artist called a show of “invisible pictorial state,” a concept reinforced by the stationing of two security guards at the gallery’s entrance to limit the number of visitors at once in the show. This lineage reframes absence not as loss but as deliberate interruption.
Like these works, Moniz turns the museum’s commissioning budget into the medium itself. Yet rather than anchor the work on the symbolic or contractual gesture, or engage the dialectical question of what makes art art, Just Tell Them It’s an Artwork displaces the focus toward direct intervention, implicating the museum in contemporary political events.
The museum framed the transaction as a “performance of economic exchange,” making visible in the wall caption the often-hidden infrastructures of power and capital that underwrite cultural institutions. This ambiguous institutional description creates the conditions for the conceptual artwork to exist, while also distancing the museum from the subject of the work itself. A donation that is possibly a lifeline for someone surviving genocide is depoliticized into sterile jargon: the museum text sanitizes, flattens an act that is, at its core, a response to human suffering.
Installation view, Ash Moniz, A Crack in the Shape of Light Getting In, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, May 2–Sept. 28, 2025. © Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai. Photo: Yan Tao
By the start of the Israeli offensive in October 2023, Osprey V had been missing a drummer. Thomas Kocherhans, the band’s former drummer and a humanitarian aid worker, had finished their contract and left the strip. Moniz met the band through mutual friends. They were embedded in various networks of aid workers, and frequently traveled to Cairo, distributing aid to Gazan families and caring for the injured. The band’s guitarist, Sayed, and former keyboardist, Siraj, both of whom had relocated to Cairo before the October 7th attack, met Moniz regularly to jam.
Moniz, who was formerly a drummer in their teenage years, joined the band remotely, recording drumlines in New York City and sending them to Cairo and Gaza — before eventually packing up their life and moving with the bandmates to Jordan.
With the collapse or absence of state infrastructure, social networks, ties to family and friends often sustain daily life. Moniz, who like many, refuses to merely stand witness, finds ways to leverarge their position as an artist to help sustain the lives of those surviving genocide or forced famine.
The next time we met Moniz in Cairo, they had packed up their life in New York City and were in transit with some of the band members to join vocalist Raji al-Jaru in Jordan. Moniz, who had been collaborating with the band remotely for over a year, beyond playing music, produced [Inaudible] in close collaboration with the band when they were still in Gaza. Moniz envisioned the video, commissioned by the Rockbund, as a potential vehicle to evacuate the band when the genocide was in full effect. With Osprey V listed as co-directors, Moniz aimed for the work’s circulation to help facilitate obtaining visas to travel out of Gaza.
During their collaboration, Moniz’s concerns with the politics of visibility were confronted with the band’s genuine dread for disappearance: the refusal of Gaza-based artists to let their work be extinguished was not an abstract principle, it was a wager that each song might be their last together.
Over the phone, we spoke to Raji about the writing of Angels Kneel and sustaining a creative impulse while under conditions of extreme violence. “The hook for the song came at 2 am. It started with a dreamy melody — as if the angel Mikhail came to inspire me,” Raji told us, chuckling. ‘Angels Kneel’ references the Quranic story of creation, in which God asked his angels to kneel before Adam.“Because humanity is so great, the angels were asked to kneel before us,” Raji said with conviction. “I am the human, the heart, everything that falls apart,” he sang, playing the track for us. “And everything was written and composed during the bombings.”
Together with Abu Hatab, the band shot the music video near their homes, in the north of Gaza, amid the rubble. Just as filming was about to begin, an Israeli drone — commonly known in Gaza as a zanana — hovered above them. “It’s when a drone goes silent that you should be afraid,” Raji said, “because it usually means that it is about to explode.” To continue filming would have been one of the hardest decisions of their lives. “And it was worth it,” he said, “this is what we do, we have a responsibility toward our culture.”
Video still, [Inaudible], 2025, color video, with sound, 17 min., 12 sec. Commissioned by the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai. © Ash Moniz. Courtesy of the artist
Coinciding with Moniz’s exhibition, the Rockbund Art Museum, in its own attempt to give back to the community, opened its doors to the public free of charge — a move that brought increased public scrutiny to the museum known for its boundary–pushing exhibitions.
[Inaudible] was shown at the exhibition opening but vanished from view shortly after. A red curtain remained drawn and a custodian quietly redirected visitors, as if the work had never been there. Osprey V were never invited to Shanghai. It was not the only artwork taken down at the museum at that time. In a quiet act of disobedience, the video continues to circulate online — a space less easily controlled.
[Inaudible] by Ash Moniz, in collaboration with Osprey V.
The video’s opening sequence pairs a neutral voiceover in classical Arabic narrating the tenderness with which a man handles a piece of paper as a keepsake with images that contradict it: nighttime in Gaza, a young man crouched on the sand making a fire by burning paper over a pit of twigs and cutting vegetables into a pot. A housekey — symbolizing the agony of displacement — floating on shami bread, adrift in a sea of boiling tomatoes, cut in the shape of pre-1948 Palestine.
The dissonance between voice and image, sustained throughout the video, exposes the scaffolding of the work; a dismantling of video’s basic grammar, characteristic of Moniz’s practice — and perhaps their way of grappling with the aestheticization of tragedy.
In their collaboration with Osprey V, Moniz’s refusal to reinforce the typical image of Gaza as a site in total disarray left the creative agency with the bandmates, and their friends, on the ground — who else could decide how to picture Gaza on screen? While Moniz reflected on the scaffolding of the work, the choice of symbolic imagery, the video’s content, seems to express rather local sensibilities, and the practical constraints of production under siege. In Gaza, under the current conditions of artistic production, artists surviving genocide and famine are compelled to return to a foundational engagement with representation and viewership: what does Gaza look like on screen? What does it sound like? How do artists gesture toward life under siege, and how does their work operate within, and potentially challenge, the often disembodied discourse on the interplay between representation and violence?
In the next scene, the narrator, the band’s former keyboardist and freelance voice-over artist Siraj Shawa, reflects on the independence his work affords him. In a dry, detached, news-like tone, he lists the benefits of appearing as ‘just a voice’ in TV and film; unbound by a physical body on screen and the logistical nightmare that would entail amid war. The boundaries he describes are material, reflecting the fragility of Gaza’s infrastructure: banks, roads, power grids, recording studios, rehearsal spaces. Things we rarely pay attention to but are essential to ordinary life are, here, in precarious condition; once dismantled, what remains is the choice between despair and the stubborn insistence to sustain a glimmer of ordinary life — a refusal to reduce existence to mere survival.
As the narrator’s voice fades, the rising hum of drones carries us into daytime in Gaza. In an abandoned car — the only soundproof place he can find — Raji attempts to record a track. The record gear is professional-grade but the circumstances are dire. An off-camera voice asks, “If something happens to me, how will they continue?” Another responds, “And if something happens to them, how will I continue?”
Some scenes that follow are intimate: Osprey V rehearsing, teasing one another, pausing mid-takes as Israeli drones hum overhead. Others are urgent: the musicians relocating from the north to Deir al-Balah under forced displacement orders.
As another day passes, night falls again in Gaza. A figure builds a small fire on the sand. “All senses are on high alert,” the narrator says, as the video draws to a close.
Video still, [Inaudible], 2025, color video, with sound, 17 min., 12 sec. Commissioned by the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai. © Ash Moniz. Courtesy of the artist
Gestures such as packaging the donation within a conceptual framework, as in Just Tell Them It’s an Artwork — or leveraging a film’s access for impact, as in [Inaudible] — draw their force from what can only be expressed obliquely. The privately-funded, public-facing museum created the conditions for these works to be produced and viewed, while also maintaining — through tactical ambiguity, institutional language and ekphrasis — a distance from the subject of the work itself.
In Gaza, if the material conditions for creative production were compromised, the artistic impulse continues to find ways of expression. Absences in Gaza are not symbolic, they are the direct imprint of siege, displacement, genocide, and the compromises artists make to survive within their contexts. These voids refuse the comfort of closure and return us to Moniz’s initial question, once again, what is the point of making art during genocide, while surviving the risk of psychological and even physical annihilation?
The answer is, perhaps, not in a single work but in the charged silences and empty spaces left behind when an artwork, its conditions, or its makers are censored, displaced, killed, or sacrificed — and in the demand that we, readers and viewers, reckon with the forces that made absence inevitable.
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