Virtual Reality Exhibit Offers a Window into Pre- and Post-Destruction Gaza

In the first week of December, Yale students, faculty, staff, and the wider New Haven community were welcomed to “The Phoenix of Gaza XR,” a lecture and virtual reality exhibit that offered an immersive window into pre- and post-destruction Gaza.

Naim Aburaddi and Ahlam Muhtaseb, a student and professor in the department of communication studies at California State University San Bernardino, respectively, created “The Phoenix of Gaza XR” as a platform for people around the world to learn, engage, and connect with the people of Gaza. As media scholars and social justice activists, they believe that 360-degree technology and virtual reality can be compelling drivers of social change.

“The Phoenix of Gaza XR” is a virtual gateway to pre-destruction Gaza, featuring hundreds of videos and images of daily activities in Gaza taken with a 360-degree camera, including bustling city streets and shops, religious and cultural celebrations, children at school and at play, women sewing, and farmers harvesting their crops. The project was born out of Aburaddi’s inability to visit Gaza—it had been 6 years when he began the project in 2022—and “his yearning to feel, touch, smell, and relive his cherished memories in Gaza.” Aburaddi and Muhtaseb hired a videographer living in Gaza to capture the footage between July 2022 and July 2023.

But since the beginning of the war between Hamas and Israel that began on October 7, 2023, in which it is estimated that 80% of the Gaza Strip has been destroyed, the creators said, “a project that was supposed to imagine a liberated Gaza turned into a heritage preservation [project] and documentary evidence of the genocide.”

“Virtual reality is a powerful tool, whose capacity to educate was made evident in The Phoenix of Gaza VR exhibit,” said Kishwar Rizvi, Robert Lehman Professor in the History of Art and Architecture. “Through the collection of thousands of images and many hundreds of hours of footage, the founders of the project were able to document and represent Gaza and Palestine through its people, their culture, their architecture, and their land. Entering the Church of Saint Porphyrius, hearing the call to prayer from the Omari Mosque, running to the beach with children, harvesting grapes on a farm – these are among the many quotidian moments captured in the VR experience.”

In 2024, Aburaddi and Muhtaseb hired another videographer to return to many of the same sites to document the destruction, and many of the sites viewers can “visit” offer the stark contrast of the ‘before’ and ‘after.’ Footage also includes interviews of Gaza’s residents during an Eid celebration amidst the rubble. In one, a boy approximately seven or eight years old tells the videographer, “They deprived us of our beloved ones and the [Eid] prayers. We want the war to end and a ceasefire.”

“Several people in the videos have been killed or displaced and several of the historical sites have been destroyed in the past fifteen months, lending an urgency to bringing the project to Yale and New Haven,” Rizvi added. “The exhibit reveals in heartbreaking detail how important the preservation of cultural heritage is and the profound human cost of the ongoing devastation in Gaza and the West Bank.”

Jonathan Wyrtzen, professor of sociology and history and a member of the Council on Middle East Studies at the MacMillan Center, spearheaded bringing the exhibit to Yale.

“After a year of an ongoing catastrophic war, a year in which many in the Yale community were intensely mobilized around this conflict, it seemed incredibly important to get the exhibit to campus and provide this space where a Gazan team transports us to Gaza on their terms, welcoming us into spaces and into life, but tragically now also documenting the ineffable loss there,” Wyrtzen said. “Three hundred to four hundred people from Yale and the New Haven community came through the exhibit, which would not have been possible without the strong support we received from more than six units across the university.”

Our thanks to Hira Jafri, Global Programs Manager at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, for her work supporting this exhibit. This event was cosponsored by the Council on Middle East Studies at the MacMillan Center for International & Area Studies; Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration; Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage; Whitney Humanities Center; Department of the History of Art; School of Architecture; Anti-Arab Racism and Islamophobia Lecture Series; and the Center for Collaborative Arts and Media.