The following article was originally published in the June issue of Bathers Minimag courtesy of the Bathers Library.

Southern Exposure’s grand gallery currently features a single, profound projection. The twenty-minute film by Mohammad Tatour stitches a selection of footage and audio files, curated by Ahmad Alaqra and Leyya Mona Tawil, from the Palestinian Museum’s extensive sound archive. The program presents a multigenerational collage of Palestinian culture and resilience through a layered film of visual images, archival footage, and audio recordings. 

After twenty years of development and construction, the $28 million-dollar Swiss-registered, nongovernmental association, the Palestinian Museum, opened in May of 2016 on the West Bank with philanthropic support, on land donated by Birzeit University. As a nongovernmental organization operating in a country under colonial occupation, the museum’s aim is to produce knowledge about Palestinian history and culture. The sound archive was spearheaded in 2019 by curator Ahmad Alaqra and the Palestinian Museum’s Department of Curation and Collections team. They put out a call for materials through Palestinian communities to build a narrative of how music is threaded throughout Palestinian society, life, and resistance, with an aim to present an extensive physical exhibition in October 2023 in Birzeit. When the museum could not present its planned show onsite as a result of the genocidal devastation of the Israel-Hamas War, they established partnerships for remote iterations. My Name is Palestine: Echoes from The Palestinian Museum’s Online Exhibit أنا إسمي شعب فلسطين “Ana Ismi Shab Falastin,” at Southern Exposure is one such place.

The Southern Exposure installation regularly calls to mind the show that might have been, the should that could not occur, and might yet occur. For instance, when “Selection of Artistic and Revolutionary Posters (1875-2012)” shine vividly on screen in two rows, you can imagine they might be displayed in space. Or, when full-screen, archival black and white photographs by Frank Scholtens from 1921-23 appear—would they be framed in a museum? My Name is Palestine thus teleports to San Francisco, vivid and spectral, eluding the possibility of touch and thereby at once foiling and reiterating the violent diminishment of Palestine’s physical spaced.  A stamp of text in the top left corner overlays Scholtens’ photos in the film, explaining the image as “the Festival of the Nabi Musa Festival—an annual pilgrimage at the shrine believed to mark the tomb of the prophet Moses, near Jericho.” The photo captures an entire hillside of visitors on foot, all gathered around a path that curves into the distance. 

 “Parallel Time,” a painting of a male face with a mustache, rendered in black and white, by Amjad Ghanam fills the screen. We cannot see its edges. The face is distorted, as though a still shot from a video with a moving subject. Text in the top right once again guides our interpretation: “From his prison cell,” the text says, “Waild Daqqa built an Oud from broken tables and smuggled strings—and from it, made music that was smuggled out for the world to hear.”  The screen splits into two, featuring a musical score from “The Forgotten in Parallel Time,” (2012) written in Jalbou Prison. Then a full screen, handwritten letter with English captions. Those are just a few of the visual elements, throughout which audio plays—including an instrumental recording of the aforementioned oud as its played within the Israeli prison sometime between 2010 and 2012. As the curators write in the exhibition walksheet, “The idea of building the instrument emerged through an encounter between Walid Daqqa and Fidaa al-Shaer, and evolved into a collective process of design, adaptation, and experimentation within the constraints of incarceration…Through this process, the prisoners transformed the surrounding objects into tools for sound-making, reconfiguring the prison environment as a site of sonic production and resistance.” This theme is reiterated again and again. As with the posters, an an extensive tape collection appears on the screen, though we cannot access the physical objects, we learn they were nevertheless assembled by Mahdi Qirresh during his tenure running “Nujum al-Fann”, a tape shop that he opened in 1972 in the Old City of Jerusalem and maintained, despite the relative obsolescence of cassettes. Other elements include marriage songs that are similarly used for martyrs, or the one of the earliest music videos, “Urgent Call for Palestine,” produced and performed by Palestinians. Each of these works begs far more attention, to unpack the nuance of each, to locate its relation to history but there is a sense of their almost fugitive progression, as though one must absorb each impression as much as possible in an attempt to memorize and therefore help preserve what is seen. 

Museums are founded on the premise of stability in any context, not only as a welcoming place for visitors but also as a place to work, house cultural artifacts, and produce research. Such institutions are intentionally constructed as timeless bastions of stability—they boast mild, constant temperatures and humidity, often as a result of similarly stable national funding. But to sustain such a foundation in the midst of an ongoing humanitarian crisis, is another matter. As scholar Hanan Toukan said in a 2021 interview with Artforum, “To put it bluntly, can the museum survive without the building that houses it, in the event that it is physically obliterated?” In this case, the audience becomes remote, offsite, an agent of memory and therefore, accountability as well.

My Name is Palestine: Echoes from The Palestinian Museum’s Online Exhibit أنا إسمي شعب فلسطين “Ana Ismi Shab Falastin,” flies in the face of cataclysmic erasure, illustrating how the voice defies walls and borders, even crossing oceans in a profound celebration of resilience.