I’M LIKE A FISH, AND FIERCE LIKE A LION, WHEN I ENTER THE RING OF FIRE brings together paintings and written testimonies by children in Gaza, developed through workshops facilitated by the Tamer Institute for Community Education during the current escalation of genocide. Produced amid sustained bombardment, forced displacement, and the systematic destruction of homes, schools, and cultural life, these works emerge from conditions in which the infrastructures of everyday existence have been deliberately targeted. The exhibition takes its title from a sentence written by Suheila and Hanin, both aged 16, across a painting, a declaration that holds vulnerability and defiance together. In recent years, children in Gaza have been rendered intensely visible across global media. Images circulate continuously, often detached from context, absorbed into the visual economy of war, or framed as memorial fragments of loss. Yet visibility has not secured recognition. As theorists of media witnessing have argued, the civic contract implied in looking has repeatedly failed. Children’s lives appear as images of catastrophe while their speech is flattened into humanitarian affect or reduced to symbols of innocence. This presentation responds to that condition by foregrounding children’s authorship and sustaining the specificity of their words and images as political address. The works emerged through Masar al Awda ilal Bayt (the route back home), a social mapping exercise building on earlier pedagogical practice in the West Bank. Adapted in Gaza in response to mass and repeated displacement, the workshops invited children to trace home as something remembered, imagined, and continually reconfigured. Across multiple sessions, children drew domestic interiors, neighbourhood routes, and sites altered or erased through violence. The paintings and vignettes that resulted do not form a single narrative. They register interruption, rupture, and reorientation within an ever-changing geography. Palestinian scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian has described the systematic “unchilding” of Palestinian life, in which children are stripped not only of protection but of the social and symbolic conditions of childhood itself. In Gaza, childhood unfolds within what can be understood as a genocide of place, where the destruction of homes, streets, and schools dismantles the spatial ground of ordinary life. The works reflect this condition. Familiar environments appear fractured. Scenes are partial. Language shifts between memory, imagination, and witness. These are not illustrations of conflict but attempts to think through massive and ongoing loss of place and daily continuity. Children whose works are included were informed that their work would be shown in Brighton and were invited to address audiences directly. Due to the total destruction of neighbourhoods, infrastructure, and communication networks, facilitators have struggled to reach many of the children. Only four could be contacted. For others, their current whereabouts and safety remain unknown. Developed in the midst of ongoing genocide, these works assert children’s authorship at a moment when Palestinian life and geography are subject to systematic erasure. Drawing and writing function here as practices of orientation and insistence, through which children register rupture, hold memory, and articulate claims to presence and return.