The First Curated Selection from the Museum’s Permanent Collection
25-02-2020 – Birzeit: The Palestinian Museum opened Glimmer of a Grove Beyond, a show curated by Adele Jarrar, which explores representations of Palestinian land and natural geography through a selection of Palestinian political posters drawn from the Museum’s permanent collection. The show is open to the public until 5 April 2020.
Glimmer of a Grove Beyond addresses the notion of landscape and the alterations inflicted on Palestine’s geography that shaped the political project and ideologies of the day, and which reflected in turn in the artistic and visual languages employed in posters. It 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.
The show is divided into seven sections: Sowing Liberation; Agency and Sanctity; Devastation as Landscape; Manifesting Palestine; Fida’i; Flowers and Anemones; and Reclaiming the Orange. Each section highlights distinct methods in which symbols or topics were employed, and sheds light on their relation to landscape.
This is the Palestinian Museum’s first show to be curated from its permanent collection, and more specifically from the Ali Kazak collection, a generous donation that includes 540 Palestinian political posters produced between the late-1960s and early-1990s. Kazak began collecting posters when he arrived in Australia in 1970. As he worked with activists and supporters of the Palestinian cause to bolster the Palestinian narrative and refute Zionist claims, Kazak requested materials and posters issued by the PLO and Fatah’s departments of information. From then on, he kept one or two prints of each poster he received.
Director General of the Palestinian Museum, Adila Laïdi-Hanieh said on Tuesday: ‘This show is significant in that it is the first to feature items that are curated from the Museum’s permanent collection, reinterpreted and artistically exhibited to the public. This collection is noteworthy, as it chronicles pivotal junctures in Palestinian history. We look forward to providing opportunities in the coming years for the public to see and engage with the Museum’s permanent collection.’ Laïdi-Hanieh also expressed her deep appreciation for Ambassador Ali Kazak’s generous donation and for his confidence in the Palestinian Museum.
For her part, the show’s curator, Adele Jarrar said: ‘This show presents a historical, political, and to a secondary degree, aesthetic legacy. It explores the Palestinian political poster and its interwoven relation to landscape through various iconographies. The Palestinian revolution ignited a border-transcendent revolutionary imagination, drawing to its orbit artists from different schools and from around the world. The posters thus varied in the styles and visual languages they employed but remained unanimous on one theme: the justness of the Palestinian cause.’
The show’s title, Glimmer of a Grove Beyond, was inspired by French author and activist Jean Genet’s memoirs, in which he recounts seeing the lights of the Galilee glimmering beyond the Jordanian frontier, where he was encamped with Palestinian fida’iyin in the early 1970s.
