Intimate Terrains: Representations of a Disappearing Landscape, April 2019


Intimate Terrains: Representations of a Disappearing Landscape explores the changing representation of landscape by Palestinian artists, and our relationship to place and location through the themes of erasure, fragmentation, distance and belonging. The exhibition brings together a spectrum of works which explore how representations of the landscape have evolved over the decades. The exhibition presents how loss and ongoing transformations of the landscape contour representations, along with addressing questions of the experience of distance from the homeland and exile. 

Welcome to the virtual tour of Intimate Terrains exhibition 
 
 
Printed in Jerusalem: Mustamloun, July 2020

Printed in Jerusalem: Mustamloun explores the relation between Jerusalemites and publications printed in their city—be their content political, educational, commercial, cultural or touristic—by probing the profession of the mustamly. It seeks to analyse the emergence and disappearance duality that was inherent to the publications of nascent social movements within the city. Those movements contended with the governing institutions and tools of censorship they imposed on Jerusalem’s urban fabric.
Virtual Tour Series, Printed in Jerusalem: Mustamloun

Section one: Remnants 

Visitors of Printed in Jerusalem: Mustamloun will be taken on a journey that surveys the city’s current reality and explores the history of Jerusalemites’ relation to the city’s printing presses and publications. This journey seeks to raise questions as to who the city’s new mustamloun are while encouraging visitors to question the mustamly’s new tools, which have surpassed the traditional processes of printing and publication. Our series of virtual tours, which will run over the next months, opens with the exhibition’s first section: Remnants. In it, we explore the Industrial Islamic Orphanage Press, which since its establishment, has printed educational books, industrial and social magazines, in addition to several local newspapers. Many apprentices were taught the printing trade and craft there and relayed their expertise to neighbouring cities and countries over the years. The virtual tour series will sequentially cover every section of the exhibition in video on the Palestinian Museum social media platforms. 
Section Two: The Sixth Communiqué

The Sixth Communiqué seeks to understand the relation between political content and the means by which it is communicated. During the first Intifada, those caught with political publications were imprisoned and banned from practicing any profession linked to printing. Paper itself was damning evidence in those days.*A mustamly (plural: mustamloun) was tasked with dictating manuscripts to copyists and acted as an intermediary between authors and the public. Historically, this transmission of content was associated with censorship as well. This ancient profession disappeared as modernisation took hold.
Section Three: Inspection and Evaluation

In this virtual tour, viewers will discover original Lawrence Press printing clichés, in addition to artistic interventions based on the collection in five corners of the gallery: Education, Commerce, Tourism, Culture, and Society.

*A mustamly (plural: mustamloun) was tasked with dictating manuscripts to copyists and acted as an intermediary between authors and the public. Historically, this transmission of content was associated with censorship as well. This ancient profession disappeared as modernisation took hold.
Section Four: Calligraphy, Education and the Press in Jerusalem’s Publications

The virtual tour of the fourth section of Printed in Jerusalem: Mustamloun begins with a set of digital fonts and an exploration of how they translate into Arabic. It also highlights the influence that calligrapher Mohammed Siyam had through the educational material and penmanship copybooks he created, which were used during the British Mandate period and Jordanian rule. The tour also draws attention to Khalil Sakakini, his influence in education, and his prolific writings. It goes on to shed light on Jerusalem’s social life through wedding invitations, health sector publications and other material that was printed in the city. In ‘Leave a Trace’, we see how in the 1960s and 70s, Israeli military censors suppressed any material of which they disapproved. In those days, newspapers often appeared with blank columns, marks of the censor’s redactions, which left readers with a space in which to imagine and wonder about the censored item. The tour concludes with the culture corner, where the disappearance and emergence of some magazines and newspapers that were printed in Jerusalem is analysed, and the history of some of these publications is 
surveyed in an interview with writer and novelist Mahmoud Shukair.
Section Five: Revival

This section of the exhibition contains a biographical presentation about Fatema Muhib and her artistic achievements. It presents printing clichés and books that feature her work, including school textbook covers designed and illustrated by Muhib.
Glimmer of a Grove Beyond, February 2020
Visual journeys through the landscape: Curated selection from the Museum’s collection of Palestinian political posters

Glimmer of a Grove Beyond explores representations of Palestinian land and natural geography through an array of political posters drawn from the Palestinian Museum’s permanent collection. The collection includes a set of 540 Palestinian political posters, produced between the late-1960s and early-1990s, which were collected and generously donated by ambassador Ali Kazak.

The curated show addresses the notion of landscape and the alterations inflicted on Palestine’s geography, sometimes represented through orientalist photography, and at times as lost geography or as fantasy. Those alterations shaped the political project and ideologies of the day, which in turn were reflected in the artistic and visual languages employed in posters. 

Glimmer of a Grove Beyond aims to outline links among the various artistic styles and methods of landscape representation, in addition to their fluctuating relation to the contemporary political project and historical circumstance. It complements the Palestinian Museum’s preceding exhibition, Intimate Terrains, and offers an opportunity to examine the landscape through an additional, unique artform: the poster.

Welcome to the virtual tour of Glimmer of a Grove Beyond show
and the permanent collection of the Palestinian Museum 
Jerusalem Lives, August 2017

In light of what Jerusalem continues to face from exclusionary policies enforced by militarisation and closure, the Palestinian Museum has created a multi-faceted project and exhibition, JERUSALEM LIVES, which aims to focus on the living aspect of the city and support its people. The exhibition attempts to examine the city of Jerusalem as a case study metaphorically representing globalisation and its failures, and find answers to inspire a better future. Veering away from clichés, the exhibition exposes the neoliberal, colonial and imperial challenges imposed by the Israeli occupation that Jerusalem and its people are facing. Could the title Tahya Al Quds be transformed from a mere slogan into an invitation to present real content and support for life in the city? What are the stories of collective resistance? How do we make Jerusalem live?

Welcome to the virtual tour of Jerusalem Lives exhibition