Curators Baha Jubeh, Abdel-Rahman Shabane, and assistant-curator Sandy Rishmawi

Saturday 15 August 
Place: Palestinian Museum social media platforms

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.

*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.