Palestinian Museum reaches out to diaspora
Perched on top of a hillside near Birzeit, the new Palestinian Museum buzzes with frenetic energy. Inside the white limestone walls, workers on ladders scrape at ceiling vents while a dance troupe rehearses an interpretive piece, aiming for perfection in advance of the museum's opening ceremonies on Wednesday.
The museum has officially opened its doors, but its vast exhibition space remains empty because of a period of upheaval on the museum board.
But it has built an extensive digital audiovisual archive called the Family Album project, which contains more than 10 000 photographs from Palestinian families in the country and throughout the diaspora.
Along with written and audio testimonies, the photographs capture family customs, traditions and culture. The archive is to be launched through an online portal later this year.
“[The digital archive] was a response to the inability of a lot of Palestinians to come to the building — the inability of Palestinians even within the country to come here. But of course also from outside, the refugees, their descendants and people in the West," said the museum's chairman, Omar al-Qattan.
“It reflected a desire, maybe unconscious, to have a transnational museum that is not limited to the country, but can speak on an interna- tional level."
In a further attempt to reach Palestinians living abroad, the museum plans to commission satellite exhibitions in other countries. The first of these, At the Seams, opens in Beirut, Lebanon, on May 25 and will explore the history of Palestinian embroidery.
“It's unusual not to have the first exhibition at the museum itself, but in a way it is also fitting," said Rachel Dedman, an independent curator who will present At the Seams. “The aim from the beginning has been for the museum to connect with Palestinians in the diaspora, with communities across the region and with a global audience."
Dedman spent two years working on the exhibition, travelling across the region to interview Palestinian families and commissioning a related film. The exhibit will explore how key political moments in the history of Palestine shaped fashion in the 20th century.
“The ways in which the embroidered dress was homogenised and transformed in refugee camps in the 1950s was a result of women from different villages of Palestine — which each had geographicallyspecific motifs and styles — all mixing in one place: the camp," Dedman said.
Initially conceived in the late 1990s by Taawon, an independent Palestinian nongovernmental organisation that works to preserve Palestinian heritage, the museum project has come in at a cost of about $28-million, mostly raised from private Palestinian donors, Qattan said.
A committee formed by Taawon initially planned to build a museum dedicated solely to the memory of the Nakba (the catastrophe, which refers to the 1948 Palestinian exodus when about 700 000 people fled from, or were expelled during, the Arab-Israeli War), but as the project progressed over the years, a younger generation of committee members pushed to expand the museum's scope to explore more contemporary themes as well. Al Jazeera