Bilna’es: Proudly Operating in the Negative

Operating between Ramallah and New York, Bilna’es is an a-disciplinary publishing platform that treats culture as a critical site of anti-colonial resistance. Working across publishing, commissioning, and collaborative production, the collective builds structures for artists to create and circulate work outside the demands of institutional validation.

From video games and web projects, to installations and performances, its work is a deliberate refusal of the art-as-commodity framework, focused instead on generating new models for mutual support where institutional recognition has failed. The platform was formed as a counter-economy of sorts, rerouting resources and redistributing sustenance to creatives who practise with little to no infrastructure and traditional support systems. “We want artists, writers, musicians, scholars, and thinkers who don’t have social or cultural capital to be able to continue their work and be taken seriously alongside others who have access,” shares its team.

The collective’s name, translating to ‘in the negative’, is its manifesto. Rather than orienting itself towards the art world, Bilna’es turns to the everyday struggle and resistance of its people, grounding their work in communal care, refusal, and the political force of cultural practice. “Bilna’es is very much about artists taking care of one another.”

As they describe it, their work is fuelled by understanding how cultural practices have historically been an important part of anti-colonial resistance and the project of liberation from systems of oppression. Their commitment has materialised in visual, aural, and textual projects like the sonic compilation Only Sounds That Tremble Through Us, which positions communal song, dance, and fragmented sound collected from across Palestine and the wider region. 

In works such as May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth (shown at MoMA in 2022), the contours of their practice become clear: gathering what is fragile, fleeting, or at risk of erasure. Whether through fractured vocals, archival gestures, or the body in motion, Bilna’es is interested in how aesthetics become a form of resistance. 

This inquiry continues with a forthcoming book series on the idea of return, bringing together writers and artists from Palestine, South Africa, and Indigenous communities in the US. They are also working on a parallel set of EP releases that invites regional artists to expand the sonic vocabulary of political resistance.

For Bilna’es, the goal isn’t to ‘change’ the art world so much as to reroute the flow of care within it. Its  publishing model is rooted in anticolonial refusal, drawing from Palestinian sonic and textual traditions to ask: What knowledge becomes possible when you’re no longer seeking legitimacy?

Cultural work has always been part of liberation movements. That art, in its most honest form, is inseparable from struggle. And that the region’s future depends on building collective cultural structures. “We’re anti-career when it comes to community work and being a social participant in the everyday struggles of our people,” they reveal. “Our respective careers are not this.”

Asked what they hope to ultimately reshape, Bilna’es is clear: “To deterritorialise who counts as an artist, writer, or thinker against market demands and institutional recognition.” In other words: to expand the field until everyone who has something to say can speak.