Summary
The museum in Birzeit, West Bank, opened in May 2016 by Taawon (the Welfare Association), a twenty-four million dollar building on a forty thousand square meter terraced plot, whose mission of being “a museum without borders” for a transterritorial, stateless nation is the subject of Hanan Toukan’s chapter (Rethinking Statehood in Palestine, PDF p.126-129, p.134).
Details
- The museum opened officially on May 18, 2016 with no art objects on display, soon after the dismissal of its chief curator and director since 2008, Jack Persekian, whose planned opening project “Never Part” had itself envisioned an empty museum with artist interventions on emptiness; Western media headlines seized on the empty opening (PDF p.130-131).
- The building takes up three thousand square meters of its plot; its terraced garden, designed by Lara Zureikat — who was prevented by Israel from visiting the site and worked from satellite imagery — plants apricot, pomegranate, olive, fig and other trees and herbs such as zaatar that the chapter says Israel has appropriated (PDF p.134-135).
- Beshara Doumani’s 2010 proposal, still the project’s blueprint, envisioned it as “postterritorial” and as “a mobilizing and interactive cultural project that can stitch together the fragmented Palestinian body politic” (PDF p.136).
- The museum distances its narrative from a 1948 starting point, beginning instead in the eighteenth century, in contrast to the Palestinian Authority’s Darwish and Arafat museums in Ramallah, whose emphasis the chapter reads as state power and state-building rather than agency, peoplehood and transterritoriality (PDF p.137-138).
- Toukan concludes that, read as forestalling the violence of amnesia and narrative erasure rather than merely decentering the art market, the museum’s wresting back of narratives, material culture and memories is a genuinely emancipatory moment in the project of epistemic decolonization (PDF p.140).
Related pages
Rethinking Statehood in Palestine, Hanan Toukan, Taawon, Beshara Doumani