Breadwinners Under Fire: a feminist visual research
As part of our 40th anniversary celebrations, DAWN is proud to continue supporting young women feminists from the global South who produce decolonial, grounded knowledge from places of struggle.
We are happy to introduce the 2026 DAWN Rising Fellow: Ruba Hassan, a Palestinian visual artist whose work draws on qualitative research and translated lived experiences into symbolic oil paintings with a strong expressionist sensibility.
Originally a practicing dentist in Gaza, the ongoing genocide and displacement forced Ruba to radically transition her path. Today, her practice approaches painting and writing as survival tools and a decolonial feminist archive—a medium to document lived realities and give them profound symbolic weight.
Her fellowship project, titled “Breadwinners Under Fire,” archives the experiences of women in Gaza who have increansingly stepped into emergency breadwinning roles amid displacement, loss, and systemic destruction. Her work frames these women as active members of society and powerful economic pillars, refusing to treat them merely as passive victims.
Ruba Hassan
The Political Economy of Conflict: research, creation, and feminist resistance intersect
In Gaza, violence against women is deeply embedded in the wider political and economic structures of war, siege, and displacement. The scale of violence and the destruction of essential infrastructure during the genocide have profoundly reshaped household roles and relations. As women and men are killed, injured, detained, or forcibly displaced, women increasingly assume responsibility for household survival while continuing to shoulder the burden of care, often in conditions where basic services and social infrastructure have been destroyed. This has produced a “double burden”: women must navigate the demands of emergency economic survival alongside unpaid domestic and reproductive labour.
Ruba’s project asks:
- What does it mean to become the sole breadwinner in a time of genocide?
- How can art serve as an ethical archive that honours resilience without exploiting pain?
To answer this, Ruba is turning testimonies into canvas. Moving beyond traditional statistics and reports, her project transforms qualitative interviews with female breadwinners into symbolic oil paintings. By utilising deeply rooted Palestinian motifs, such as the red Hanoon (anemone) flower, representing memory, blood, and her destroyed hometown of Beit Hanoun, her process captures the heavy, embodied realities of survival that traditional data leaves behind.
Grounded in the core feminist principle of “No research about us without us,” the methodology incorporates a participatory feedback loop: participants review preliminary sketches to ensure the artwork authentically reflects their true agency, realities, and vision, rather than an external gaze.
Through the intersection of qualitative research and visual art, Ruba’s project will bring women’s experiences into public view, engaging deeply with DAWN’s framework on the Political Economy of Conflict and Gender-Based Violence.