BEK Opening Week 2026 Gaza: A Rehearsal for the End of the World
Published
Film programme curated by Ayman Alazraq and fundraiser for Hassala – A Lifeline for Gaza Artists
Sunday, February 22.
BEK, C. Sundts gate 55, floor 9
14:00-18:00
14:00 Doors open
14:15 Gaza: A Rehearsal for the End of the World, presentation by Ayman Alazreq
15:00 Firas Shehadeh, Like an Event in a Dream Dreamt by Another—Dreamcore (2024), 39 min
Warm lunch served
16:30
– Ibrahim Khalid, Please Help Me Kill You (2024), 4 min
– Khaled Tuaima, Hunger (2025), 3 min
– Shereen Abdelkareem, The Face of the City (2022), 11min
– Shereen Abledkareem, From the Hole of the Needle (2022), 5min
Fundraiser for Hassala – A Lifeline for Gaza’s artists
In conjunction with the film programme Gaza: A Rehearsal for the End of the World, curated by Ayman Alazraq, we are organising will do a fundraiser for Hassala to support artists in Gaza.
Amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza, where each day brings irreversible loss, Hassala is a cultural and humanitarian intervention. Initiated by the artistic coalition “Artists Together”, Hassala exists to protect the survival – both physical and creative – of Palestinian artists in Gaza who continue to create, resist, and remember through art.
As bombs destroy homes, families, and neighbourhoods, Gaza’s artists are being killed, displaced, and starved. Hassala offers urgent support to help ensure that this generation of artists – Gaza’s cultural memory-keepers –-can survive today’s destruction and still have the tools, strength, and support to tell the story tomorrow.
Please donate to Vipps: #87779 and mark payment with “Hassala”
For more information on Hassala, please visit https://hassala.art/
Gaza: A Rehearsal for the End of the World – Film programme curated by Ayman Alazraq
The digital age has created a contradiction. The same technologies that connect people around the world are also used to isolate, monitor, and erase. This is especially clear in Gaza, where daily life is shaped by surveillance from satellites, drones, and digital systems.
Gaza: A Rehearsal for the End of the World, curated by Ayman Alazraq, is more than a film programme. It is a direct report from the centre of this reality. The works in this programme are made under the pressure of ongoing violence, and the artists have taken on many roles: documenting, resisting, and imagining new possibilities.
This program shows how modern tools like video game engines, 3D modelling, and virtual environments are part of both the problem and the response. These technologies are used to control, monitor, and divide. At the same time, Palestinians use them to tell their own stories, hold on to memory, and document what is happening. The works here use technology not to escape, but to look closely at how control works and to piece together evidence and testimony.
Here, ‘rehearsal’ means many things. It is practicing survival in a system built to keep people on edge. It is holding on to memory when forgetting is forced. It is learning skills like coding and modeling to get by and push back against digital control. Most of all, it is preparing for a different future. The films in this programme move between digital worlds and the real destruction in Gaza, showing how the virtual and the physical are connected in daily life.
Presented at BEK, this programme encourages us to notice the data we create, the systems we support, and the ethical questions behind new technology. By showing works that use these tools to document what is being lost, Gaza: A Rehearsal for the End of the World provides a clear insight into resistance today. It invites viewers to move from watching to taking part in the ongoing story of data, power, and the need to remember and return.
The films
Firas Shehadeh, Like an Event in a Dream Dreamt by Another—Dreamcore (2025), 39 min
This film forms the final, culminating chapter of a trilogy that uses the city of Los Santos from Grand Theft Auto V, as a parallel reality. Dreamcore takes a quantum leap from representation to active, aesthetic sabotage. It is less about simulating reality than about corrupting a prefabricated fantasy to make space for a new one.
It focuses intently on the glitch — the visual tear, the broken physics, the corrupted texture — as both a metaphor and a methodology. These digital malfunctions are wielded as intentional acts of vandalism against the colonial vision embedded in the game’s world. Here, the dream logic of the colonised intrudes upon and overwrites the sanitised, predatory dream of the settler.
The film argues that in a context where reality is meticulously managed by algorithmic governance, the most potent act may be to introduce the irrational, the unstable, and the poetically dysfunctional. Dreamcore is thus a work of speculative coding, where to dream within the machine is to perform the most concrete act of defiance: re-enchanting a tool of control with the blueprints of liberation.
Ibrahim Khalid, Please Help Me Kill You (2024), 4min
This video zooms out to implicate the global systems that make digital resistance necessary. This film exposes the invisible “microwork” that fuels artificial intelligence, often performed by precarious refugees and workers from the Global South. Unknowingly categorising data that may train surveillance algorithms or targeting systems, they become ghost workers in a chain of technological violence. By connecting this reality to Palestine, the film poses a devastating, recursive question about complicity in the digital age. It challenges the viewer to see the invisible hands that build the tools of oppression, framing data labour as a new frontier of colonial extraction and raising urgent ethical questions about the very infrastructure of our contemporary world.
Khaled Tuaima, Hunger (2025), 3 min
Amid the siege of northern Gaza, a filmmaker captures haunting scenes that blur the line between cinema and reality. What begins as raw documentation of survival soon transforms into a desperate testimony, an echo of the Spanish film The Platform brought to life under relentless extremity. Using only his phone, Tuaima records not for the present, but for history, daring to lend his own voice when words have all but run dry. This film stands as both witness and warning: a stark reminder that reality has now surpassed even the darkest of cinematic visions.
Shereen Abdelkareem, The Face of the City (2022), 11 min
Turning from the virtual to the acutely physical, this project is an architectural elegy and an active archive. In a cityscape where buildings and memories are equally vulnerable, The Face of the City combats enforced amnesia. It employs a multidisciplinary process — layering photographs, spatial sound recordings, and community testimony — to create intricate digital models of Gaza’s ever-changing streets. These models are less about nostalgic preservation than about dynamic study; they clarify the impact of time, war, and blockade on urban space. The work generates a navigable, historical document where the human dimension is permanently projected onto the architecture, ensuring that the city’s lived memory is preserved in a form capable of outlasting hardens into a form that can outlast its material counterpart.
Shereen Abdelkareem, From The Hole of a Needle (2022), 5 min
“From The Hole of a Needle” explores the unique social, cultural, and political landscape of Gaza City, shaped by over 15 years of an ongoing blockade. Every urban space has its distinct identity, influenced by external and internal factors, and Gaza’s is particularly marked by imposed and extraordinary conditions. Through four conceptual scenes, the film documents and simulates the evolving narrative of the city, presenting its struggles: “Men in the Sun” examines the blockade through the lens of the Rafah crossing; “Faded Image” highlights the pervasive issue of unemployment; “Under Fire” addresses the relentless impact of repeated aggression; and “Security Rejection” ventures into the challenges of restricted travel and movement. These scenes are crafted artistically and architecturally to reflect the layered visual and emotional landscape of Gaza, offering a poignant study of life under extraordinary circumstances.
About the curator og participants
Ayman Alazraq
Ayman Alazraq is a filmmaker, photographer, and mixed-media artist. His short film The Passport has been screened at prestigious venues such as the National Museum of Cinema in Turin, Italy, and the Cologne International VideoArt Festival in Germany. His video and photography installation You From Now On Are Not Yourself has been exhibited in Spain, Norway, Denmark, and the Gaza Strip.
In 2015, Alazraq’s short film Oslo Syndrome was showcased at the Autumn Exhibition in Oslo, the Dubai International Film Festival, and the London Palestinian Film Festival. In 2017, he collaborated with Emanuel Svidén to produce the WALL-1 project, an interactive wall-mounted installation featuring a vibrating heartbeat. This project was exhibited at various venues, including Podium Gallery in Oslo (2017), Tabakalera in Spain, Theaterhaus Jena in Germany (2018), and Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster, Germany (2019). Additionally, WALL-1 is permanently installed at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences.
Alazraq’s documentary film Into My Lungs explores the harsh working conditions in Bangladesh’s textile industry and was screened at Kunstnernes Hus in 2022. His mixed-media installation The Lost Tapes of a People’s Tribunal 1982 was exhibited at Fotogalleriet in Oslo during the 2023/2024 season.
In 2023, he initiated the Artist to Artist Project, a digital residency supporting artists in Gaza, which culminated in the exhibition For You at Tenthaus and Podium. More about the project can be found at artist2artist.no.
Firas Shehadeh
Firas Shehadeh is a Palestinian artist. His work explores worldbuilding, meaning, aesthetics, and identity. His practice investigates the post-colonial condition through the lens of technology, history, digitality, and speculative realities. Working across film, video, and sound, Shehadeh conducts a sustained inquiry into the ways narratives and identities are constructed, contested, and mediated within contemporary society.
He holds a Master of Fine Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Shehadeh’s work has been presented internationally at festivals and institutions including the second MUNCH Triennale, Almost Unreal (Oslo), the 18th Lo schermo dell’arte (Florence), the 14th Mercosul Biennial (Porto Alegre), London Short Film Festival, Centro de Cultura Digital (Mexico), Beta Festival (Dublin), Beursschouwburg (Brussels), Soft Centre (Naarm/Melbourne), Images Festival (Toronto), B7L9 (Tunis), Los Angeles Filmforum, Ashkal Alwan (Beirut), unsafe+sounds (Vienna), the 7th Singapore Biennale, Centre d’Art Santa Mònica (Barcelona), A.M. Qattan Foundation (Ramallah), 7th Cairo Video Festival, 4th Digital Marrakech and the 64th Berlinale (Berlin).
Ibrahim Khalid
Ibrahim Khalid is a visual artist whose artistic practice stems from a keen interest in and meticulous observation of changes in his geographical surroundings and how places express themselves through the intertwining of reality and imagination.
Attached to his family’s relation with Palestine, he employs various media in his works, including video, 3D design, and artificial intelligence.
Khaled Tuaima
Khaled Tuaima is a filmmaker from North Gaza, he is a self taught director with experience in documentary filmmaking, particularly in war zones.
Shereen Abdelkareem
Shereen Abdelkareem (Gaza, 1996) is a Palestinian architect and visual artist. She holds a bachelor’s degree in architecture from the Islamic University of
Gaza- IUG. Her interdisciplinary practice explores the relationship between urban space, memory and visual storytelling. She employs architectural language to reflect on how Gaza transforms over time, and through drawing, collage, sculpture, installation and modelling, creating visual archives that document and preserve urban identities. Gaza remains a central axis in her work, both as a conceptual and emotional framework.
Accessibility
BEK’s space unfortunately is not wheelchair accessible. Please send us an email at bek@bek.no if you’re using a wheelchair, and we’ll do our best to facilitate your needs. Our space has all gender toilet facilities. Service dogs are welcome. We also provide the option of a quiet room.
Images: 1) Design by Blank Blank Studios 1-2) Still from From The Hole of a Needle, 2022 by Shereen Abdelkareem 3) Still from Hunger (2025) by Khaled Tuaima 4) Still from The Face of the City (2022) by Shereen Abdelkareem 5–6) Still from Like An Event In A Dream Dreamt By Another — Dreamcore (2025) by Firas Shehadeh 7) Still from Please Help Me Kill You (2024) by Ibrahim Khalid