Artist Dorgham Quraiqi was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza on March 18, according to Hope and Play, a UK charity that had supported his work in Palestinian refugee camps. The Art Newspaper reported on Thursday that he was 28.
Hope and Play said that Quraiqi’s family was also killed during the airstrike. “In Dorgham we lose a great colleague who always came up with new ideas and knew how to realize them with great enthusiasm,” the organization wrote in its announcement. “A wonderful and talented person is no more.”
Quraiqi’s work had included organizing film screenings for children in Palestinian refugee camps. He also painted, showing his work in venues such as the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit. That institution is featuring his work in “This Is Not Exhibition,” which focuses on how Palestinian artists, specifically ones in Gaza, have used their art to protest “the ugly cruelty of the occupation that is meant to dehumanize.”
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The show is co-organized by Shababek for Contemporary Art and the Eltiqa Art Gallery, two contemporary art spaces that were destroyed in airstrikes. The latter gallery participated in Documenta 15 in 2022; its activities are the subject of an exhibition now on view at the Jameel Art Centre in Dubai.
The sense of ruination experienced by the organizers of those art spaces was something familiar to Quraiqi, who wrote on his Instagram this year that Israeli forces had destroyed his studio.
In his most recent Instagram post, from two weeks ago, he wrote, “After 15 months of displacement, I returned to Gaza to find myself faced with an incredible and very difficult reality; after the destruction of my house and office completely destroyed by the Israeli army, all my artworks I was preparing for my first exhibition ‘Until a chair grows wings’ have disappeared under the rubble. These works were more than paintings; they were a part of my soul, of my dreams that I have always dreamed of sharing with the recipient.”
Since 2023, other artists have also died in Gaza. That year, in October, Heba Zagout and Muhammed Sami Qariqa were killed in airstrikes. In 2024, painter Fathi Ghaben died after Israeli authorities reportedly denied him opportunities to leave Gaza to seek medical aid.