BredaPhoto 2026 stages SWANA counter-archive against erasure

A posthumous exhibition of work by Gaza-born photographer Majd Arandas, killed in an Israeli airstrike on 1 November 2023, anchors the SWANA strand of this year's BredaPhoto Festival in the Netherlands.

Titled Our Songs Came Through and running until 25 October, the biennial's regional programme — co-curated by Mohamed Somji, Ileana L. Selejan and Astrid Hulsmann — gathers artists from the Southwest Asia and North Africa region who are building what the curators describe as a "counter-archive": a self-authored historical record intended to resist the flattened, media-driven imagery long assigned to the region by international photography.

Somji, whose curatorial practice was honed programming at Gulf Photo Plus in Dubai, including its Slidefest evenings, was initially wary of the festival's comfort-focused theme. "When we started talking about this theme toward the end of the last festival, I was skeptical about how easily it could become very kumbaya – a superficial 'let's all go into the mountains, cleanse our world, and come back' approach, while mass killing and active displacement are unfolding in Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Sudan, Iran and elsewhere," he says. "We went back and forth on the texts and the selections of artists, work, and more, to make sure the structural, political reality was firmly addressed."

"The artists featured here aren't just capturing conflict, they are archiving the poetry, the domestic resistance, and the psychological architectures that endure when people insist on surviving on their own terms," Somji adds.

Noor Abed: liberation rehearsed

Palestinian artist Noor Abed's specially commissioned video installation, we walk in our sleep, rejects the iconography of the barrier — checkpoints, watchtowers, concrete walls — that defines most outsider depictions of Palestine. Working with her family and neighbours, Abed films collective rituals on open hillsides, gestures hovering between ancient agrarian labour and contemporary performance.

The work began when Abed noticed people muttering to themselves in the streets of her hometown and connected it to the sacred space between the living and the dead. "In the last few years, it started to become physical. The dead are among us, I truly believe that," she says. "It became an exercise of listening to and being close to the martyrs [those who have been unjustly killed]."

She positions folklore not as nostalgia but as a tool of survival. "Once the past is turned into mere symbols, there is a risk of not being able to breathe anymore," she says. "This kind of work gives us the tools to crack open a radical collective imagination, that gives us both the hope and the means to rehearse liberation. Because there is no future other than liberation."

Fouad Hallak: Studio Damascus

Born in Syria, Fouad Hallak fled the country by migrant vessel and claimed asylum in the Netherlands. His series A Mind in the Past, Eyes on Tomorrow documents his return to a homeland in transition following the fall of the Assad regime. Fascinated by old studio portraiture and its disappearance due to war, he built a temporary mobile portrait setup in the streets of Damascus, inviting residents to sit for Studio Damascus, a new archive of Syrian presence.

"When survival becomes part of everyday life, the simple act of having a portrait taken becomes difficult," Hallak says. "I believe that having a portrait taken with your family can be a sign of stability."

Of his return, he recalls photographing Khaled, who protested and fought against the regime: "He carries his history with him and still moves forward… Before, this possibility did not exist. Now it does. For me, that is hope."

Fatima Joumaa: the after-image

Photographer and filmmaker Fatima Joumaa turns the counter-archive toward South Lebanon (Al-Janoub) and Beirut's southern suburbs (Dahiyeh). In From My Mother's Novel: Returning to South Lebanon, she weaves images through her mother Layla's old notes and sketches, combining analogue photography, poetic video essays and first-hand testimonies. The concept of the "after-image" — what remains once foreign cameras depart — is one she developed into a series for the independent Lebanese magazine The Public Source.

Joumaa describes persistent institutional pressure to sanitise her images. "I have been asked to remove flags, portraits of martyrs, political signs, or anything that might make the image appear too political to them, as if there's anything that isn't political," she says. "And I refuse to portray my people only as victims."

She could not return to her village in Janoub to bury her grandmother — a reality, she notes, shared by many families in South Lebanon.

Huda Abdulmughni and Majd Arandas

Kuwaiti photographer and researcher Huda Abdulmughni takes a different register of survival with Nowruz Sayadeen, documenting the annual fisherman's New Year on the Iranian island of Qeshm, when the village pauses its primary source of income out of respect for nature's seasonal bounty. Her analogue and digital images capture the shushis — figures adorned with white face paint and palm leaves — outside the strict categories of Western ethnography, while registering a world increasingly threatened by climate change and geopolitical conflict.

Arandas's A Memorial in Fragments confronts active elimination. Born in Gaza in 1994, he was killed in an Israeli airstrike near his home in Deir al-Balah on 1 November 2023. Forced by the Israeli blockade to sell his professional camera, he continued documenting Gaza on his mobile phone; his brother retrieved and preserved the archive. "Whether it's a beautiful exchange between Majd and a friend about the plants in his beloved grandmother's garden, or a photographer friend exchanging cat photos with him, it shows how communities find ways to bond together, and provide solace, despite everything that's against them," Somji says.

Gatekeeping at the border

The festival also exposes the mechanics of Western gatekeeping. Libya's Amera Elnaal was denied the visa required to enter the Netherlands and could not attend her own exhibition, on view with the series The Salt Ate Away Her Eyes.

Rather than grouping artists under a banner of shared trauma, Our Songs Came Through frames its SWANA participants around shared commitments to visual sovereignty, formal experimentation and archival repair — arguing that restoring a fractured archive demands not more images, but a reinvented methodology of image-making.

*BredaPhoto Festival 2026, Our Songs Came Through, runs until 25 October.