It’s been eight months since the Gaza Solidarity Encampments at Columbia University launched an international student movement targeting institutional complicity in Israel’s attacks on Palestine. After multiple police raids, hundreds of arrests, and campus suppression, a new collective has formed from the school’s intersecting pro-Palestine movements.
Hinds House Collective (HHC) made its off-campus debut last weekend, November 9 and 10, with a simultaneous exhibition and teach-in event harkening back to the April takeover of Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, which was renamed “Hind’s Hall” by students and activists in tribute to five-year-old Hind Rajab. The Palestinian child was trapped in a car in Gaza with the bullet-riddled bodies of her dead uncle, aunt, and three cousins — all of whom were killed by an Israeli army tank. Rajab was eventually killed, as were two paramedics who responded to her frantic calls for help.
In a press statement, the anonymous collective cited Columbia University Interim President Katrina Armstrong’s “vapid apology” to those “harmed” by the police during the encampment dissolution as the catalyst of its inception. “When a genocide is in place, we are not going to be silenced by fascist measures imposed by the Columbia administration,” the group said.
“During the three encampments, art building served as a vital outlet for our community — a means by which we could come together and stand against genocide,” HHC’s statement continued. “The art on Hinds House’s walls serve merely as another channel through which we can build a deeper, more personal coalition.”
The exhibition was mounted in the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity house on West 114th Street, which is the “closest privately owned building to Hind’s Hall [Hamilton Hall]” and was therefore the ideal venue for the exhibition, HHC told Hyperallergic. The group also collaborated with the Palestinian Museum in the city of Birzeit in the Occupied West Bank, utilizing the institution’s ready-to-download exhibition materials throughout the space.
In a statement, Alpha Delta Phi’s Columbia chapter told Hyperallergic that one of its own members proposed to host the exhibition on-site.
“The show felt like an urgent and resonant choice, especially given our history of solidarity— flying the Palestinian flag in 2016, 2019, and once again now, since October 2023,” the chapter continued. “Given the strong presence of student organizers among our membership and our commitment to being a safe space on campus, we were honored to host the exhibit within our house.”
Hyperallergic visited the two-floor exhibition, simply titled HINDS HOUSE, upon its Saturday evening opening. With video and audio installations, sculptures and assemblage, and wide sweeps of painting and drawing across the yellow-painted walls of the house, the show recalled the aesthetics of an immersive experience. One room was entirely enveloped by a pro-Palestine quilt that made its inaugural appearance on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan in March and has since grown with additional squares over time.
Artist and writer Rebecca Goyette, who spearheaded the quilt project alongside several collectives including Hope in the Art World (HITAW), explained that displaying the collaborative work in this way was “an opportunity to support Columbia students’ activism, and created a soft space to contemplate the violence inflicted upon Gaza and the West Bank.”
“Keeping this project alive continues to stimulate artists’ voices throughout, and ensures that this cause remains at the forefront of people’s minds,” Goyette continued, noting that squares will be added “until Palestine is free.”
“In my lifetime, there’s never been an issue that’s been so intentionally silenced, so I want to normalize solidarity with Palestinians through this installation,” she said.
Artist and fashion designer Meryl Ranzer took over two adjacent walls in the opposite common room with hundreds of mixed-media daily self-portraits dating from October 7, 2023, through the present. As the weeks progress, the text accompanying Ranzer’s portraits shifts from singular words and emotions to calls such as “Ceasefire now,” “End the genocide,” and “Arms embargo now,” indicating an evolution from processing one’s own feelings to engaging in broader cries for systemic change as the atrocities persist.
“The concepts and medium evolve and change — as have I,” Ranzer said to Hyperallergic. “Mixed media is well suited to this series because I am also a fashion designer and use scraps of fabric along with paint to capture the many facets of our humanity. I see both fashion and war as units of imperialist extraction.”
In the first-floor corridor, artist Peloloca’s sculptural rendition of the Palestinian cartoon Handala, a 10-year-old refugee child drawn by the late political cartoonist Naji al-Ali, stood with his back to the world. According to the cartoon’s history, Handala will neither age nor reveal his face until Palestine gains autonomy and he can return to his homeland.
“Bringing Handala to Hind’s House felt like a homecoming,” Peloloca told Hyperallergic, explaining that the sculpture first made public appearances across Queens to stimulate conversations about Palestine among passersby. In the exhibition, the two-foot-tall sculpture was placed next to an altar dedicated to Hind Rajab.
“Witnessing this image of the children together — two hugely important figures of Palestinian Liberation — has been profound and emotional,” Peloloca said. While Handala’s growth is conditional upon his return, she implied, Rajab will never have the opportunity to age.
Nerdeen Kiswani, the co-founder and chair of the Palestinian activism group Within Our Lifetime, spoke as part of the exhibition programming on Saturday. In an onsite interview, Kiswani told Hyperallergic that she was moved by the show and glad to have been able to attend, especially now that Columbia University has officially made her a persona non grata and will arrest her if she sets foot on campus.
“The fact that this was called Hind’s House as a reference not only to Hind’s Hall, but also Hind Rajab, is very sobering,” Kiswani told Hyperallergic. “This student activism and anti-genocide messaging actually reached back to Hind’s mom, who was incredibly touched by this. But it begs the question: How many stories like that of Hind are we not aware of?”
Kiswani called the exhibition “a reminder that whatever harassment, suppression, and institutional violence these activists are faced with is incomparable to the suffering that the people in Gaza, and now Lebanon and Yemen, are going through in resisting this genocide.”
As attendees were seated on the floor, three artists performed a spoken-word recital of former Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s final will and testament.
Last June, after the violent dissolution of Columbia’s encampments, student activists were tipped off that some of their protest artwork had been collected and archived by the university’s library system. Responding to this, HHC told Hyperallergic that “it is fitting for colonial institutions first to denounce and then adopt the very practices they once conquered, subsequently incorporating them as a part of their pride.”
However, the university’s actions emphasized the collective’s notion of how intrinsic art and community are to the movement.
“I have no illusions that a single piece of art is going to make a difference in the big fights ahead of us, but when your expression is part of a larger movement, it has the potential to alter the course of history,” Peloloca concluded.
