Nothing remains in Gaza, except art.’ Maha Daya

Maha Daya is a Palestinian visual artist originally from Gaza. A trained painter and embroiderer by resistance, she has turned art into a tool to document exile, grief, and violence in her homeland.

A mother of three, she lives in France as a refugee, after fleeing the Israeli siege that has devastated the Strip since October 2023. From there, her work denounces the ongoing massacre with threads, maps, words, and paintings.

Before her displacement, her life was spent between brushes and canvases. Her most recent exhibition in Gaza, opened just two months before the Israeli incursion, was titled Only Rubble, in which she reflected on the 2021 attacks.

“That could have been a violent war,” she would later say. “But this is not a war. This is a massacre. It’s unlike anything.”

Language of Dispossession

In the midst of loss, she found a different language: Palestinian embroidery. “I felt that stitching could express pain, suffering, and displacement more profoundly than oil painting.”

After fleeing to Egypt, she began embroidering maps of Gaza, words in Arabic and English without stitches, forcing the viewer to interpret the hidden, the incomplete, the fragmented. She chose a traditional Palestinian pattern for each word.

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In one of her most recent pieces, the phrase "All Eyes on Rafah" is woven in cross stitch, surrounded by black bats hovering over a geometric symbol reminiscent of tatreez, the Palestinian national embroidery.

Another of her works shows the thin silhouette of the Gaza Strip, stitched in black and red on white fabric. They are wounds, scars, traces. The phrase "Where Are We Going to?" also appears, embroidered with pain and millimeter precision. “Art conveys suffering,” she says. “It's a way of telling the world what we're going through. What our children are going through. What we've left behind.”
The war in Gaza is a threat

The situation in Gaza, she explains, is desperate. Famine plagues the entire Palestinian population. “Today they said they were going to bring in aid, but people haven't seen anything. Everything they drop from the planes falls on the army's side. If a person gets close, they kill them. There's no food, no flour, no vegetables.

They're starving the population. And displacement is another form of torture,” Maha mentions.

When asked what can be done from Mexico or Latin America, she doesn't hesitate. Her voice rises: “Let our voices reach out. That's the most important thing. Let the world hear us, let them see us.

When there are protests, even if they're far away, it gives us strength. It reminds us that we're not alone. That someone still thinks of us.”

Maha doesn't just embroider fabrics, she embroiders messages. She embroidered Gaza when nothing remained. She embroidered questions when there were no answers. And while her work is on display in France, her sister calls her from Gaza to tell her that there is nothing left in the market. No food or fruit. No life.

“Our mission is to make our voice heard.” And she succeeds. Each stitch is a testimony, a stroke, a proof. Each work, an act of resistance in the face of oblivion.
What you should know

Senior UN officials, including Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, have formally accused Israel of committing acts that may constitute genocide against the Palestinian people, as stipulated in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
Since the beginning of the Israeli massacre in Gaza on October 7, 2023, more than 60,000 Palestinians have died, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health. Approximately 18,000 of them are children.
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