Power Outage, 2024, by Finnish-Lebanese artist Yasmina Alexandra Nysten depicts several figures: men, women, and children gathered tightly around a makeshift fire in a metal barrel. Seated or crouched in a circle, they are illuminated by the fire’s warm glow, which sharply contrasts with the cool, shadowed ruins behind them. Their faces reflect exhaustion, concern, and quiet consideration. Nysten emphasizes these figures’ individuality through angular features, textured skin, and expressive shadows. Amid catastrophic ruin, the group finds connection and fragile hope anchored by the fire as both literal warmth and symbolic resilience.

Nysten’s Power Outage, 2024, from her series فلسطين (Palestine), is a deeply charged social and political work that visually captures the emotional and material realities of the Palestinian condition. At its core, the painting is about endurance: the figures huddle around a makeshift fire in a barrel, their faces bathed in warm light, while behind them, a war-torn urban landscape crumbles into shadow. The presence of the keffiyeh, a symbol of Palestinian resistance and identity, immediately grounds the image in a specific cultural and political context, transforming the scene from one of general crisis to that of collective struggle and national memory.

The intimate and innately humanistic quality of this work gives it a resonant weight especially in parallel with the deluge of horrific images from Gaza’s ongoing destruction. All the figures in this painting are real people: the woman at the top of the painting wearing yellow is the Palestinian revolutionary Leila Khaled; the woman sitting next to her began as a depiction of the Palestinian artist Samia Halaby, but gradually morphed into a self-portrait of Nysten instead; the remaining figures are based on individuals the artist had singled out from the many images of the war on Gaza. These figures are not anonymous victims, but individuals connected through the tragic historical continuity of a conflict that has been going on for decades.

The fire represents both physical heat and a metaphor: a center of survival, resistance, and fragile hope. Its glow reveals the humanity of the figures, their exhaustion, and their will to endure. Furthermore, it allowed the artist to explore the theme of ‘power outages’: a time when everything comes to a sudden dark stop, where the fire pit becomes a beacon to gather around silently in quiet contemplation.

Power Outage is more than a documentation of a particular moment of history; rather, it is an active form of witnessing: an artwork that holds the pain, dignity, and resistance of a people under siege. In this sense, Nysten’s work is not just a portrait of survival, but a political act.