FESTIVAL SELECTEE 2026
ADAM ROUHANA
Before Freedom
“I was trying to reconcile the experience of being Palestinian with what I kept hearing on the news about Palestine, while growing up in the US – this very singular lens of either violence or oppression – and try to make sense of that split reality. I wanted to look at everything else – the mundane, the family, the everyday that is so full of life in Palestine, despite it all”
– Adam Rouhana
Forestillinger | Scenarios
Another Palestine
Project: Before Freedom by Adam Rouhana
A boy leaping into the Mediterranean Sea, half a dozen surveillance cameras on a street sign, families resting in front of Al Aqsa mosque during Ramadan – Before Freedom, by Palestinian-American photographer Adam Rouhana, poses questions about what we think we know about Palestine and, in doing so, challenges the very notion of photography as an objective rendering of the truth.
Raised in the US by a Palestinian father and an American mother, Rouhana’s sense of place was shaped by an upbringing between the east and the west. In 2022, he set out on a new photography project to try to reconcile how the depth of life in Palestine could coexist with the flattened narratives of violence and oppression that dominated American media.
Before Freedom looks beyond Palestine as just a physical place, and instead investigates threads of life in a society that has emerged over the course of hundreds or even thousands of years. Through his lens, Rouhana captures not just cultural, religious, social traditions that persist against all odds, but also the memories passed between families from generation to generation.
Through this body of work, Rouhana argues that the idea of Palestine has been flattened by the mass media to become either an occupied people or a violent resistance. Instead, Rouhana’s work asks: “What is at stake in Israel’s genocide in Gaza? And what role do images play in laying the groundwork to reduce Gaza to rubble?” Before Freedom questions what the idea of Palestine means beyond the narrow visual vocabulary that has long defined it.
Reframing the narrative
At the outset of the project, Rouhana had a rough plan and a set of personal questions to guide him: What does Palestine mean to me? What does it mean to be Palestinian when I have no state to return to? How do I make sense of a reality split between my lived experience and what I hear about Palestine on the news back in America?
“At a certain point, I realised I was trying to recreate representations that didn’t truly reflect my whole experience. I found myself chasing the images people expect to see from Palestine – a boy throwing a rock at soldiers, a burning olive tree, masked protesters – the scenography the world already recognises. Those pictures often came from the outside. I thought, what happens if I look inside?”
Confronted with the insistent flow of media images, he turned his camera toward family gatherings, quiet streets, gentle moments of care, and the everyday routines that continue despite the wider political reality. With this shift in focus, Before Freedom took shape.
Adam Rouhana // Before Freedom
Livability as Resistance
By focusing on Palestinian life rather than the constant horror we have witnessed during the last two years in Gaza, Rouhana attempts to visually challenge the dominant representations of Palestine. Rouhana’s photographs have become reference images of life in Palestine, moving from fiction to fact.
“I hope to frame the livability of those remaining in their homeland – simply moving, swimming, crying, planting, loving, walking, jumping, being alive and well despite a system designed for and intent on their removal. Life goes on despite the horror. If we only ever see one kind of image, then that becomes the whole story.”
The images of everyday life in Before Freedom become relevant counter-images for a people without functional state institutions to build their own visual representations. Simple images of a boy eating a watermelon, girls lining up at schools, or children enjoying a swim go a long way. Ordinary life may seem unreal or even naïve, but it is also a deeply necessary imagery in order to imagine a future free of violence.
Adam Rouhana // Before Freedom
Imagining another Palestine
Before Freedom has moved beyond the photographer’s personal reflection into a wider inquiry about the way visual representation functions and the role of the photograph as a tool for social documentary – does photography objectively render reality? Rouhana’s images do not attempt to offer clarity or closure, rather they exist within a space of tension and contradiction, where ordinary life continues against the constant presence of apartheid, displacement, and mass death.
By insisting on the visibility of life as a Palestinian reality routinely obscured, the work offers a crucial new perspective on what a reasonable future – and freedom – might look like.
Adam Rouhana // Before Freedom
Forestillinger | Scenarios
“‘Forestillinger (Scenarios’) is essentially what the work is about. It operates in a dialogue between fiction and fact, because in some sense I’m portraying scenes of freedom in a place that is not by any means free. In doing so, the work tries to remake some of the imposed scenes to denaturalize outdated representations, constructing a new visual reality”
– Adam Rouhana
ARTIST BIO
Adam Rouhana (b. 1991, Boston, MA) is a Palestinian-American artist and photographer based between Jerusalem and London. Rouhana’s photography works to deconstruct orientalism through his subjective lens within the broader context of Palestine. Through the introduction of new narratives, Rouhana’s work embraces themes of the past to create a contemporary Palestinian visuality characterized by representations of Palestinian lives that embody an active ethic of self-determination.
His writing and visual work have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Aperture, Journal of Palestine Studies, Dazed, The Art News Paper and The Guardian. His work is held in the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Museum, the Krupa Art Foundation, and the Palestinian Museum.
Selected achievements
– 2025 Adam Rouhana The Logic of Truth, Kyotographie, Kyoto, Japan
– 2025 Night of The Year, Rencontres d’Arles, Arles, France
– 2024 60th Venice Art Biennale: Artists + Allies x Hebron SOUTH WEST BANK Landworks, Collective Action and Sound in collaboration with Dar Jacir for Art and Research
– 2024 Adam Rouhana. Before Freedom, Kunsthal Rotterdam, Netherlands
– 2024 Adam Rouhana: Before Freedom Frieze No.9 Cork Street, London, UK
Interview | Text · Veera Mononen
Text | Edit · Christine Almlund