In partnership with the Institute for Palestine Studies
Starting on Wednesday, September 17th
Location: The Palestinian Museum

The Palestinian Museum and the Institute for Palestine Studies invite you to visit the exhibition Not Just a Memory: Khalil Raad and the Contemporary Eye, which reintroduces the experience of pioneering Palestinian photographer Khalil Raad (1854–1957), twelve years after his first exhibition.

This new edition provides an opportunity to reflect on the ongoing relevance of Raad’s work and the questions it raises about the relationship between photography, memory, place, and the Palestinian narrative in the face of colonial erasure.

Raad’s archive, preserved at the Institute for Palestine Studies, spans from the late 19th century to the 1940s, documenting the transformations of Palestine at the crossroads of Ottoman rule, the British Mandate, and the emerging Zionist project. His images ranged between the staged and the spontaneous, the biblical and the contemporary to his time, revealing the Nakba and the profound changes that preceded it in both land and people.

Today, these photographs are revisited through contemporary readings that introduce new critical dimensions. In his installation Permission to Narrate, Adam Rouhana reactivates the large-format photographic techniques that defined Raad’s practice, but turns them toward portraying Palestinians in the present. These works do not simply echo Raad’s visual language; rather, they reformulate it within a moment of profound fragmentation; sharpened by the war on Gaza and the ongoing systematic erasure of Palestinian life and culture.

Thus, the exhibition unfolds as an extension of Raad’s images, not as a static archive, but as renewed visual testimonies of memory, identity, and struggle.

The exhibition opens to the public on September 17 at the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit. Given the current circumstances—daily closures, incursions, and military sieges disrupting movement across cities, villages, and refugee camps—the museum will not hold an official opening. Instead, visitors are welcome to experience the exhibition at their own time, whenever possible.