STATEMENT
This installation mourns young Palestinian adults killed in Gaza, their potential unfulfilled, their graduations and apprenticeships stolen amid genocide – and the deliberate destruction of education best described as scholasticide.
Coined in 2009 by Palestinian scholar Karma Nabulsi and now used by UN experts, the term scholasticide describes the systematic targeting of educational infrastructure. Every university in Gaza has been destroyed, over 90% of schools damaged or demolished and more than 9,000 students have been killed along with hundreds of teachers and academics.
“Stolen Futures” centres on the tragic deaths of members of the Abuzour family, highlighting 12 young adults among the dozens of relatives killed in Israeli attacks. This includes an airstrike on 4 December 2023 that killed or fatally wounded 55 family members along with the death of Mohannad Abuzour, burned alongside his mother in a fire that engulfed their tent in Al-Bureij Refugee Camp on 8 October 2024.
The “Mourning Mortarboard” sits at the heart of the work as a ritual symbol of academic grief (see Factsheet: Mourning Mortarboard), evoking the ceremonies and achievements forever denied to these young people. Surrounding the mortarboard are 12 symbolic books – weighty volumes rough-hewn from real bricks. Representing the 12 young adults from the Abuzour family, each is inscribed in Arabic with the title of a subject taught at Lancaster University. They also evoke the rubble from which new schools and new futures may one day be rebuilt in Gaza. Those young adults, along with other Abuzour family members, remain buried beneath the rubble.
In harmony with the broader “Gauze” exhibition, the portraits of these individuals have been transferred onto gauze—a material historically woven in Gaza and symbolic of both healing and profound loss. Scattered amidst the bricks are 12 thornless gauze roses: fragile emblems of remembrance, resilience, and the promise of renewal. Even amid this devastation education endures.
Two cohorts of Palestinian doctors recently completed their advanced medical training and received their specialist certifications in front of the ruined façade of al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest medical complex, repeatedly targeted and reduced to rubble.
The “Humanity” cohort which comprised of 168 existing doctors completed their advanced medical training and received their specialist certifications in front of the ruined façade of al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest medical complex, repeatedly targeted and reduced to rubble. Their cohort embodies humanitarian resistance and protection of life amid suffering. They received their certificates on 26 December 2025.
The “Phoenix” cohort comprised a further 230 new doctors and evoked the rebirth and resilience rising from destruction like the mythical phoenix from ashes. They received their certificates on 3 January 2026.
Their ceremonies stand in defiance, affirming the unbreakable spirit of true knowledge.
As Gaza-based academic Ahmed Kamal Junina has poignantly expressed:
“To insist against all odds that Gaza still thinks,
still questions,
still creates.
That in itself is an act of resistance.”
Christine Dawson
2026