Dear Laila

April 11–May 3, 2026

Palestine — N.Y.C. Premiere

Dear Laila, you are five now and have started to ask me where I grew up, and why we can’t go there. This is me trying to give you an answer.

Meet the Artists

Basel Zaraa is a UK-based Palestinian artist whose work uses the senses to bring audiences closer to experiences of exile and war, and who creates art in order to face, express and understand the trauma that his community lives with. His current installation, What Will We Do Without Exile? is an immersive, multi-sensory installation that creates a lush world within a refugee tent, inviting audiences to imagine life beyond occupation and war. Since 2022 he has also been touring Dear Laila, an intimate, a one-person-at-a-time installation centred around the recreation of a destroyed family home, which received the ZKB Audience Award 2023. His previous work includes As Far As My Fingertips Take Me, a collaboration with Tania El Khoury, which was awarded Outstanding Production at the Bessie Awards in 2019. His work has been shown at over 50 venues and festivals across five continents.

PlayCo is proud to present Dear Laila, from Palestinian artist Basel Zaraa, at Stand4 Gallery (414 78th St, Brooklyn), Salam Arabic Church (414 80th St, Brooklyn), and Theaterlab (357 W 36th St. 4th floor).

Basel Zaraa is a UK-based artist born in the Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus, where his family lived after being exiled from Palestine in 1948. He is the second generation of his family to be born and grow up as a refugee outside Palestine. Zaraa created this installation in response to his young daughter Laila’s questions about his now-destroyed childhood home. Unable to take her there, he decided he would bring the place to her.

In Dear Laila, Zaraa addresses his daughter, recalling sights and sounds of his childhood home via Walkman audio that audiences listen to over headphones—placing them in the perspective of a child having a parent’s precarious past gently explained to them.

Attendees enter the 15-minute experience alone, sitting face-to-face with a detailed miniature of Zaraa’s former home as they encounter a story of displacement suffused with memories of joy, family, and the beauty of community. The recorded audio in Dear Laila will be available to audience members in English and Arabic.

Two of the venues hosting our presentation of Dear Laila, Stand4 Gallery and Salam Arabic Church, are nestled within Bay Ridge, a South Brooklyn neighborhood alive with Palestinian culture, and we'll provide community maps at the installation that highlight nearby restaurants, grocers, bakeries and small businesses—all within walking distance—to enrich your experience and help support what makes Brooklyn's "Little Palestine" so remarkable.

Dear Laila presentations at Salam Arabic Church (April 22-25) and Theaterlab (April 27-May 3) will also exhibit selected works from the New York Pavilion of the Gaza Biennale, a collective of artists from Gaza formed that challenges the art field to reckon with the weight of the ongoing genocide, presents a model of resilience, and fulfills a desperate need to recognize the depth and complexity of human life." Click here to learn more and read about some of the artists and their artwork on display.