The Immigrant Artist Biennial opened its third edition on Oct. 8 at Brooklyn Art Haus with "The Immortals: Three Stories. One Unfinished History," a performance by New York-based artist Rawya El Chab. Her piece considers how political identities, collective memory and family histories are inherited and contested across generations.
Presented by ArteEast, the 45-minute work-in-progress performance marked the opening of "Identity Card," the 2026 edition of the biennial, which runs Oct. 8 through Nov. 11 across venues in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Founded in 2019 by artist Katya Grokhovsky, the biennial has presented the work of more than 175 artists, creating a platform for immigrant artists through exhibitions, performances and public programming.
“When we think about immigrant artists, it's really artists who have recently come to the U.S. or are part of a diaspora that is more recent," said Anna Mikaela Ekstrand, associate director of the Immigrant Artist Biennial. "It's thinking about these experiences of having multiple ideas of what home is, having multiple ideas of what belonging is, and moving through systems of immigration in the U.S. right now, both the sort of emotional and the sort of very practical."
This year’s edition takes the identity card as both a document of belonging and an instrument of exclusion. The biennial’s organizers describe its central concern as the condition of being “neither here nor there,” without secure access to land, home, citizenship, roots or community. Across its programming, Identity Card considers how the structures that establish identity can also constrain movement and determine who is permitted to belong.
At Brooklyn Art Haus, El Chab approached these questions through the political history of Lebanon, tracing the hopes and contradictions of the Lebanese left through the experiences of one family. The performance brings together material from three of her previous works, "Lula 19/85 & the Pearl of Bekaa, Crossing the Water" and "Immortal," into a new theatrical composition.
Rather than presenting history as a settled sequence of events, El Chab draws from the past and an imagined future. The resulting structure moves through time and between personal recollection, political upheaval and speculation, asking what survives when the narratives through which a community understands itself begin to fracture.
At the end, El Chab revealed to the audience that “the operation did not even happen that way," and that "there was nothing about anyone who had been killed in 1985 on that date. That operation itself is just mythology, a story.”
Following Thursday’s opening, Identity Card continues through Nov. 11 with screenings, performances, panels, workshops, and a potluck at partner venues including BRIC, Residency Unlimited, Nguyen Wahed and the Shiva Gallery at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Participating artists and organizers will address questions of censorship, knowledge and territorial sovereignty throughout the series.
In addition to the events and pieces on display, the biennial will be accompanied by a PDF catalogue featuring repurposed text and newly commissioned essays.
For a biennial concerned with the documents and boundaries that define belonging, El Chab’s performance offered a fitting point of departure: a reminder that political histories are also intimate ones, carried across generations and continually rewritten by those who inherit them.
For the full program, including Identity Card running through Nov. 11, visit the Immigrant Artist Biennial’s site.
