The Palestinian Museum Hanan Toukan How are we to think about a museum that represents time, despite its increasing unpopularity the PNA has a people who not only do not exist on conventional continued to act as the internationally recognised maps but who are also in the process of resisting oblit- representative of a state-to-be in international dip- eration by one of the most brutal military complexes lomacy. This role has necessitated its participation in in the world? What is, and what can be, the role of cultural diplomacy and top-down identity formation a museum in a violent colonial context compounded in an attempt to rebrand the image of Palestinians by the twin effects of imperialism and capitalism? as non-violent and modern global citizens residing Whom does the museum speak for in such a context? within the 1967 borders – processes that are key to And what can or should it say to a transterritorial understanding how and why the Palestinian Museum nation while physically located in a supposed state- has, from its inception, had to think about represent- to-be, that has no real prospect of gaining control over ing the story of the Palestinian people outside the its land, water or skies through current international limits of the diplomatically sanctioned, yet now prob- diplomatic channels? ably defunct, two-state solution.4 Four interrelated phenomena are central to think- Second, one must take account of ongoing Israeli ing through these questions in relation to the recently colonial practices of cultural exclusion and military opened Palestinian Museum in the university town domination. Supported by an architecture of bureau- of Birzeit in the West Bank, on a hill that offers a cratic hurdles and procedures, the Israeli occupation breathtaking view of farms, terraced hillsides and the uses a carefully designed system of legalised, insti- Mediterranean Sea.1 First, the convoluted, bureau- tutionalised and normalised racial discrimination to cratic and deceptive nature of the Oslo Peace Process debilitate the freedom of movement of objects, people and the new phase of colonisation that it inaugurated and ideas that a museum or any institution of know- 2 in 1993. This predicament, which has been described ledge production requires in order to function. As as one of living in a ‘postcolonial colony’3 is largely I demonstrate, the Palestinian Museum has had to defined by the paradox of living in a state without sov- manoeuvre around this in order to materialise. ereignty in the West Bank and Gaza under the guise Third, the Palestinian Museum has indirectly in- of a diplomatic process leading toward a two-state terrogated the European museum’s western-centric solution. Under this regime, the Palestinian National yet universalising mission of acquiring, conserving Authority (PNA), established in 1994 as an outcome of and displaying aesthetic objects as part of the project the now unpopular Oslo Peace Accords, did not gain of constructing nation-states and indeed modernity full sovereignty for itself or the Palestinian people it itself. It is precisely because of the Museum’s restric- ‘represents’. Rather, it became the middleman of the ted spatial reality that it is able to intervene in a global Israeli Occupation, managing security and repress- discussion concerned with the role of the museum in ing Palestinian dissent on behalf of Israel through our world. This conversation centres on the question its own internal military and intelligence apparatus, of how to make the museum – an institution historic- helping to intensify Israeli colonial strategies of spa- ally bound up with the emergence of the nation state tial segregation and economic control. At the same and the notion of the public in eighteenth-century Europe – relevant to the global realities that shape project in its various iterations since its inception its direction today.5 The Palestinian Museum can in 1997. Headed by Omar Al-Qattan, former Chair- be read as proposing answers to this question, first, man and acting Director of the Palestinian Museum through its mission of being ‘a museum without bor- project, board member of Taawon, chairman of the ders’,6 and second, in the very process of its construc- Al- Qattan Foundation9 and son of one of Palestine tion by drawing on the land’s historically terraced- and the Arab World’s most beloved businessmen and landscapes to create a structure embedded in the com- philanthropists (the late Abdel Mohsen Al Qattan), munities and histories it seeks to speak to and for. Taawon played a highly visible role in the making Through this process, the Museum arguably rethinks of the museum. Taawon, which is highly respected 7 the ‘postcolonial museum’ as an unstable yet dy- regionally and locally in Palestine for its financial in- namic memory-making institution in flux, as much dependence, especially from western funders, and for a living archive of violence as an affective encounter its humanitarian work, is well known for how seri- with the weight of the land and history. In doing so, ously it takes its self-proclaimed mission to ‘preserve it intervenes in a global conversation about the sen- the heritage of the Palestinians, supporting their liv- sorial dimensions of exhibition and collecting prac- ing culture and building civil society’.10 The Museum, tices in violent settings on the margins of the global one of Taawon’s flagship projects, became a crucial South. site for the implementation of its heritage mandate. The final aspect that informs my reading of the As with most of its humanitarian projects, Taawon re- Palestinian Museum is the wave of state-supported lied heavily on private money donated by Palestinian building and renovation of museums and other art business entities on the association’s board such as institutions underway largely in the Arab Gulf states Arab Tech Jardaneh (a private practice of consulting but also in Lebanon, Egypt, Kuwait and to a lesser engineers), Consolidated Contractors Company (one extent Jordan, from which the Palestinian Museum is of the first established Arab Construction Companies), arguably set apart by virtue of its status as an insti- Al-Hani Construction and Trading based in Kuwait, tution representing a transterritorial and stateless Projacs International (the largest Pan-Arab project nation. Unlike the regional museum projects sur- management firm), as well as the Bank of Palestine. rounding it that offer clear instances of top-down Yet as is always the case with the building of art globally-attuned national identity formation, state- institutions with private sector funds, questions con- led societal development, and soft power and pub- cerning transnational financial ties, corporate ethics 8 lic diplomacy, the Palestinian Museum prompts a and relationships with local cultural elites arise. The rethinking and reworking of the vexed relationship role of Taawon prompted those working closely with between local Palestinian non-citizens and transter- the project and others observing from afar to pon- ritorial Palestinian publics and their supporters, on der how much the project was about global capitalist the one hand, and the aesthetic form of an exhibition elite collusion with the local NGO sector rather than and the tastes of its varied global audiences, on the a response to the needs of the Palestinian people. In other. this regard, people I interviewed or conversed with as On the surface, it is easy to dismiss the beautifully part of my research raised a number of provocative landscaped, bunker-like, low and uneven $24 million questions: first, about the manner in which Taawon building that has become known as the Palestinian disbursed funds earmarked for the cultural sector to Museum, as the vanity project of one organisation one museum as opposed to a wider range of cultural and possibly even one person. The Welfare Asso- projects, arts organisations and other activist initi- ciation, better known by its Arabic name Taawon atives already underway in Palestine; second, about meaning ‘cooperation’, Palestine’s largest humanit- how Taawon was seen to run the museum as if it were arian and development non-governmental organisa- one of its mainstream NGO socio-economic develop- tion founded in 1983 by a group of Palestinian busi- ment projects, without the curatorial insight needed ness and intellectual figures, has spearheaded the to get a Museum of this kind off the ground; third, in 11 the eyes of some, especially those not working directly tion of the political economy of cultural production. within the museum or in the art world, the opening of Even if the Museum has been able to propose innov- an empty museum in May 2016 made clear just how ative museum practices (which it has), its ability to much it had been compromised by mismanagement; survive its near impossible predicament of belonging and finally, and perhaps most ominously, was the al- to a ‘state’ that is not in a position to defend itself, will legation that Taawon board members were getting ultimately depend on the extent to which the transna- returns on their in-kind donations to the Museum tional networks, including the financial ones, that it in a context that has allowed big businesses to set draws upon will allow it to experiment freely with the terms of cooperation for smaller and more local different forms of knowledge production, narrations businesses. of memory and cultural heritage preservation. Sentiments like these gathered from discussions about the Museum are a reminder that even the most brilliantly conceived projects encounter friction when they leave the space of conception to become transformed into concrete projects. Specifically, the process by which museums located at the nexus of the colonial/postcolonial divide reinvent their spaces and visual narrations in contexts in which the divisions between public and private are opaque, and access to landscapes and architectures necessary for the movement of objects restricted, is fundamentally a ques- 12 An empty museum? If there is a blotch on the Museum’s image that metaphorically and visually represented some of the misgivings expressed about it, it was at its official opening on 18 May 2016, when there were no art objects in the building on display. The opening took place soon after the firing of Jack Persekian, the Museum’s Chief Curator and Director since 2008, and one of the Arab region’s most recognised contemporary arts curators, over ‘planning and management issues’.11 RADICAL PHILOSOPHY 2.03 / December 2018 The Museum was supposed to have opened with abstract and theorised project conversing more with Persekian’s curated project ‘Never Part’, which was to the global art sphere than the local cultural scene.15 have featured illustrative material objects from the Being a grassroots organisation, Taawon may also lives of Palestinian refugees all over the world. The have been attuned to the fact that Palestinians, who ‘Never Part’ team envisioned and worked towards an lack sufficient access to their own artefacts but who empty museum for the opening, but they wanted in- value whatever material culture they are still in pos- terventions from artists contemplating the emptiness session of as a means of historical narration, needed of the building vis-à-vis Palestine’s experience of hav- to see a museum that carried their name with ob- ing had its material culture confiscated, destroyed jects in it if only as a symbolic affirmation of their or disappeared to accompany this emptiness. The existence. Hence, even if the tradition of the empty point was to reflect on Palestine’s predicament – its museum (whether empty of audiences or artefacts) lack of control over borders, waters and skies – and to may have been an apt framework for highlighting question the meaning of a museum, the artefacts and the Palestinian condition in conceptual terms, in the collecting practices that supposedly define it, in the Palestinian context, it takes on a different meaning. case of a people violently dispersed all over the globe When the Jewish Museum first opened without and prevented from accessing their past and material objects in Berlin in 1999 it was to highlight the eerily present. In Art Is Not What You Think It Is, Claire Far- claustrophobic and uneven architecture of the zinc- ago and Donald Preziosi demonstrate how the archi- clad building that was meant to evoke feelings of fear, tecture of contemporary museums inspires active re- disorientation and paranoia, even though the point lationships between exhibitions and visitors, thereby of the museum was to celebrate Jewish contributions provoking the potential that germinates in the built to the history of the city.16 The initial emptiness of structure of the museum.12 Accordingly, when artists the Museum corresponded to the message being con- and curators are invited to converse with the spaces of veyed. In the case of the Palestinians, history has put museums rather than contexts of art-in-architecture, them in the absurd position of perpetually having to unexpected capacities may be set in motion which go convince the rest of the world of their very existence. beyond the ordinary encounters of exhibitions and In response, scholars, artists and filmmakers working spectatorship, works and visitors. Persekian and his in and on Palestine, interested in countering orient- team, conversant in global art theory and practice, alist tropes representing the Palestinian as terrorist, were working within a genealogy of modern and con- victim or romantic revolutionary, are slowly building temporary art that conceptualised and theorised the a formidable archive of the historical fact and experi- museum space as an artwork and a statement in and ence of ongoing dispossession and displacement, but 13 of itself. also continued survival on the land. By recording and But having the museum empty for the official proactively re-organising existing oral and visual test- opening, which was scheduled to coincide with Nakba aments of surviving witnesses they are reassembling 14 Day, did not go down well with the Museum Task the story of the Palestinian struggle into a coherent Force set up by Taawon to take charge of the museum and introspective counternarrative that rejects the project. Less interested in the language of conceptual central tenets underscoring the media and public dis- art and the contemporary global artscape’s often ex- course on Islam, Arabs and the Palestinians. Even if it perimental approach to engaging with the political, is difficult to access, cultural heritage and specifically and more concerned with the Museum’s role as a local material culture is the site where this reclamation of cultural institution that speaks to the transterritorial narrative is fought for most fiercely. Palestinian reality of displacement, solidarity net- Ironically, notwithstanding Taawon’s misgivings works and grassroots initiatives, Taawon might have about the curatorial conceptualisation of emptiness, seen in the proposed opening a shift in the role of the the Museum ended up being empty on the day of Museum from borderless centre for Palestinian cul- its opening thanks to a series of internal develop- ture and heritage to what they perceived as an overly ments that culminated in the dismissal of Persekian, 13 officially attributed to differences over ‘planning and insurance requirements. The point of the intriguing, management’.17 Despite viewing the Museum as in- even if overly elaborate and expensive, project was complete, Taawon decided to move ahead with its to highlight just how difficult it would be to bring opening to honour the promise they had made to artworks to Palestine. open it on Nakba day.18 It was difficult to ignore the ironies implicit in the opening of the empty Museum in 2016 by the everunpopular Mahmoud Abbas, president of the PNA. This was especially true of mainstream Western media coverage. Headlines such as ‘Palestinian Museum Opens Without Exhibits’, ‘The Palestinian Museum Set to Open, Empty of Art’, or, more provocatively, ‘Palestinian museum opening without exhibits, but creators say that’s no big deal’ were predictably unkind.19 Cynically hinting at a people with neither the capacity nor the cultural history required to fill such an expensive and well-designed building, the media latched on to the fact that the Museum was empty. Conveniently, these same media outlets almost entirely ignored the reality of Palestinian existence as a dispossessed people with histories, memories and material cultures scattered all over the world or stolen by their colonisers through the cultural appropriation of music, books, art and food, or the seizure of objects 20 and especially archives. This reality, in addition to the lack of control over the movement necessary for the travel of art objects – normally central to a museum’s practice – makes compiling, acquiring and exhibiting works an almost impossible feat. In artist Khaled Hourani’s 2009 art project ‘Picasso in Palestine’, Pablo Picasso’s 1943 portrait of his lover Françoise Gilot, Buste de femme, was exhibited on the grounds of the International Art Academy of Palestine in Ramallah. The bringing of Picasso’s Buste to Ramallah, a collaborative effort between the International Academy of Art Palestine (IAAP) and the Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands which began at the Middle East Summit held at the museum in 2008, was nearly three years in the making. In Hourani’s project, the process of bringing one of Picasso’s most famous works to Palestine included wrestling with the thorny politics of Oslo, international protocols defining museum loan traditions that normally deal only with sovereign states, the bureaucratic measures implementing so-called peace agreements, and Israel’s control over checkpoints, airports and international 14 On the political economy of museums Only a few months after the tumultuous official opening of the Museum without art objects in it, in a much discussed public speech as part of the Young Artists of the Year Award (YAYA), hosted annually by the Abdel Mohsen Qattan Foundation,21 Al-Qattan reproached the failure of the Palestinian cultural and artistic milieu in the era of Oslo to produce any meaningful dialogue or questions about the demise of the Palestinian national project.22 Having just returned from a trip to Gaza, Al-Qattan – also the director of the Al-Qattan Foundation, one of Ramallah’s most prominent cultural institutions – seemed to be lashing out at the entire cultural scene. In fact, Al-Qattan expressed the discomfort that many, if not most members of the public, including writers, intellectuals and artists, feel in the West Bank and Gaza about the extent to which cultural work and especially the visual arts have been able to engage with the collective Palestinian experience of oppression. In his words, he wanted to use the opportunity of the YAYA to address what he described as a ‘quickness, superficiality and general disengagement with historical and political subjects’.23 Much has already been written about the debilitating and depoliticising effects of the NGO-isation process sponsored by international aid to the region – a process that has led to what is described by Palestinians as the collapse of the national liberation project. With globalisation and transnational cultural markets becoming the norm as elsewhere, artists and their institutions have not only been forced to readdress their role in the politics of the region and the transnational networks they need in order to survive, but also to present Palestine’s plight and contributions to critical global conversations in the arts and activism more broadly. In Palestinian artist Khaled Hourani’s words, ‘Artists started to reconsider the perception of arts, portraits, borders, artistic values, relations of artworks and exhibits, audience and arts dealers.’24 Whether, as a generation of artists, they were in fact RADICAL PHILOSOPHY 2.03 / December 2018 able to do so without compromising on the core values trade, enabling us to historicise today’s class of Mu- of cultural resistance and the role of contemporary art seum investors.28 Contemporary businesses are part in it, is today a central and uncomfortable discussion of a longer genealogy of capital accumulation and in Palestinian cultural circles. investment in Palestine and the region at large. At Interestingly, on the day of the official inaugura- the same time, they are only one component in a con- tion of the museum in 2016, the building was empty tingently linked cluster of people, technology, objects of artefacts but not of objects such as the materi- and knowledge which circulate through the social and als needed for the construction of the museum like economic fields that museums inhabit.29 This raises shovels, barrels and piles of cement. As some crit- a question: even if the site of construction material ics of the museum quipped, the fact that the mu- and workers visually symbolise Ramallah’s role in the seum was not emptied of its construction materials normalisation of the Occupation, and provoked the was a visual reminder of precisely how tied up it was ambivalent feelings that some felt toward the open- in global capital circulation and real-estate develop- ing of an empty museum, might it still be possible ment, a marker of Post-Oslo Palestine par excellence, to separate the function of the Museum as resistant rather than a representation of the dispossessed and praxis from the context of its provenance? oppressed people it supposedly represented.25 This observation, which directly references the landscape dotted with cranes used to build the five-star hotels, restaurants and upmarket housing that have come to define the ‘elite-driven production of space’ in Ramallah in particular, prods us to think about the tensions between the provenance of the museum’s capital and what it symbolises.26 It is a fact that most of the investors in the Palestinian Museum were businessmen who made their money in the Arab Gulf. It is also believed that donations included in-kind contributions, revenue from which was channelled back into the construction, management and development firms of some of the board’s members. Adam Hanieh has shown how the internationalisation of Gulf capital throughout the economies of the Middle East has been a central feature of regional capitalist development over the last two decades.27 Palestinian class formation since Oslo has gone hand in hand with the internationalisation of capital, a process that sits at the heart of the economic doctrine of neoliberalism. Hanieh posits that Palestinian class formation cannot be understood solely through the prism of Palestine’s subordination to Israel. Important businesses based in the Gulf have played a critical role in restructuring society in ways that make it highly reliant and dependent on transnational capital in order to survive. Along these lines, Sherene Seikaly provides a fascinating account of a dynamic class of Palestinian capitalist entrepreneurs involved in both local and regional Landscape and architecture Taking up a mere 3000 square metres of the 40,000 square metre plot on which it stands, the landscape in which the Museum is set is as aesthetically and politically significant as the building and its artefacts. The visual and sensorial experience of standing in the foyer of the building is one of an affective encounter with the weight of history, the land and continued presence on it. Indeed the topography of the land on which the Museum is built and its terraced gardens designed, were as significant to the conceptualisation of the Museum as the building itself. According to Lara Zureikat, the landscape architect based in neighbouring Amman, understanding traditional practices of horticulture and working with the site’s slopes and its existing plants were central to the Museum’s mission to respect the cultural and natural heritage of the landscape and its determination not to disrupt it yet again.30 This is in reference, and contrast, to the Israeli Occupation’s practice of intercepting and intervening in the harmony of the landscape for settlement construction, surveillance and wall building purposes which sever Palestinians’ access to cultivable land.31 Predictably, Zureikat, who is a Jordanian national, was prevented by Israel from visiting the site of the project. She and her team resorted to the use of satellite imagery and internet communication to finalise the project. This reveals how, from the beginning, the process of turning the Museum into 15 a material reality from an idea was imbricated with Mahmoud Abbas cutting the ribbon on the opening the Museum’s objective of building on the transterrit- day becomes more palatable. orial reality of Palestinians by thinking imaginatively about modes of delivery. The building is therefore physically and conceptually responsive to its landscape and built environ- The art institution, the state and decolonisation ment. In the words of Conor Sreenan, chief architect The PNA complained about the Museum’s apparent of the project from the Dublin-based architecture firm appropriation of what it saw as the state’s role of cul- Heneghan Peng, ‘It was the physical that introduced tural patronage, most visibly in the name the museum us to the geopolitical. We literally traced the existing chose for itself: ‘The Palestinian Museum’. Despite topography and looked at the way that the landscape this point of contention, Taawon felt the need to be 32 The idea, courteous and to invite the President because in the he explained, was not to be defined by the Occupation end, as Al-Qattan explained, ‘we need to work with but rather to take back control of the landscape. the existing bureaucratic structure and engage it, re- had been inhabited for 2000 plus years’. The hills of the West Bank, on which sit illegal gardless of who is in power. We cannot function in Jewish settlements, visually embody what settler co- isolation’.33 Al Qattan’s reasoning might sit uncom- lonialism entails and the consequences it has had. fortably with activists who see resisting colonial vi- Some of these include moving communities into ter- olence as a fundamentally confrontational act that ritories acquired in war – a Zionist practice that pred- requires tackling head-on the PNA’s role as middle- ates the establishment of the Israeli State – in ad- man of the Occupation. Yet it is perhaps the only way dition to settler violence against local Palestinian in which to get a grand project of this kind off the communities and the imposition of new demographic ground in colonised Palestine today. The question realities on the ground that will not only threaten the that this reality begs is whether a museum of this form but the very possibility of a future Palestinian kind was needed and whether Taawon would have State. The planting on the grounds of the Museum done better to distribute its millions to the multitude of groves of apricot, pomegranate, mulberry, cypress, of artists, writers, film-makers, collectives, activists olive, walnut and fig trees, lemons and oranges, herbs and smaller-scale arts organisations that are work- like zaatar, mint and other plants that Israel has ap- ing laboriously to collect and document Palestine’s propriated as part of a policy of erasing the memory history and cultural heritage – a question I heard on and identity of Palestinian people, are a step towards numerous occasions in the field. reclaiming what has been taken away. Rasha Salti and Kristine Khouri’s Past Disquiet: But standing inside the small Museum and look- Narratives and Ghosts from the International Art Exhib- ing out of the floor-to-ceiling windows that adorn ition for Palestine, 1978 revisits the making of The In- an entire wall that overlooks the hills and the Medi- ternational Art Exhibition for Palestine which opened terranean Sea in the distance that Palestinians are in Beirut in the spring of 1978 and which comprised barred from reaching, thanks to Israeli imposed re- some 200 works donated by artists in solidarity with strictions on movement, the foundation on which Palestine from nearly 30 countries. Following its in- Zionism stands is usurped, even mocked, if only mo- auguration in Beirut, and after parts of it had travelled mentarily. In other words, instead of directly con- to Japan, Norway and then Iran some years later, the fronting politics as such, the Museum may in fact be Israeli Army invaded Beirut in the summer of 1982 aiming to create a platform from which to expand with the aim of flushing out the PLO. The building the meaning of the political to include not only crit- where the collection was stored was bombed, along ical thought and the collection and exhibition of dis- with the offices of the PLO’s Office of Unified Inform- persed art, but also to link the lived and built envir- ation where most of the archive of the exhibition onments and peoples’ relationships to each of these. would have been stored. Salti and Khouri’s painstak- With this in mind, even the sight of the unpopular ingly curated exhibition traces the sheer challenge 16 RADICAL PHILOSOPHY 2.03 / December 2018 of locating the works, archives, stories and memories reflect on their colonial pasts and presents by refer- scattered today all over the globe, but which were in- encing objects and ideas that are accessible to them tended as a seed collection for a museum in exile until in physical or virtual form. From plans to set up a the moment it could ‘return’ to a free Palestine. 34 virtual museum and online archival platforms to the construction of satellite museums (in Chile, the US, UK, Jordan and Lebanon) and the novel incorporation of landscape and topography into its programmatic definition and practices, the Palestinian Museum has committed itself in both concept and practice to ongoing anticolonial and decolonisation processes.36 Its space is, then, equally a potential launch pad for interventions into discourses on, and practices of, ‘decolonisation’, and specifically the ‘de-westernising’ of knowledge production in a changing postcolonial world, by calling into question the principles that sustain the current dominant knowledge production system, particularly in respect of art and museums in this case.37 To appreciate what a significant institution the Museum is, despite its precariousness, we need to revisit Palestinian historian Beshara Doumani’s original conception of the project and the strategic plan he envisioned for it. Doumani was invited by Taawon in 2010 to submit a proposal for a museum to the organisation’s Palestinian Museum Task Force. To this day, the Museum continues to use his original Palestinian artist Nasser Soumi has been work- proposal as the blueprint for ongoing development ing since the mid-1990s to recover some of this lost of the project, even if it has been modified somewhat cultural history by navigating the labyrinth of facts, along the way. Doumani envisioned the museum as urban legends, hints, clues and social tensions that ‘post-territorial’ (in its need to encompass Palestini- cluster around some of the disappeared paintings that ans who are scattered transterritorially and unable featured in the show. When I recently asked him about to access their homeland) and as ‘a mobilising and his evident personal need to do so in the face of chal- interactive cultural project that can stitch together lenges he has faced from colleagues as well as the the fragmented Palestinian body politic by present- PNA that point to the impossibility of such collect- ing a wide variety of narratives about the relation- ing practices, he replied that Palestinians need some ships of Palestinians to the land, to each other and semblance of an art institution especially as their so- to the wider world’.38 His starting point wasn’t the called state refuses to look for the story of resistance geographical locale of the West Bank and Gaza – even 35 in places where it is not in control. For him, find- if the museum building would be situated near Ramal- ing these works and knowing their story is a way for lah, the purported capital of a future Palestinian State Palestinians to reclaim part of their lost archive. – but rather the dispersed and divided Palestinian These histories and artistic initiatives point population brought together through online techno- to the importance of a site around which an op- logy.39 This population is composed of Gazans under pressed people fighting for liberation may gather siege, Jerusalemite Palestinians walled off from the to (re)present their narratives, (re)negotiate their rest of their people, Palestinians living in the West strategies of protest in the face of oppression and Bank who are intercepted, harassed, enclosed and sur- 17 rounded by a complex of Israeli checkpoints, as well the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. By be- the Palestinian citizens of Israel and all those living ginning in the 18th century, it was agreed, the museum as refugees in neighbouring Arab countries and as would better reflect the reality of the Palestinians as exiles in the rest of the world. a dispersed people with urban, rural and intellectual Doumani, like Soumi and others who witnessed or histories who were in existence well before Zionists remember Israel’s destruction of the Palestine Inform- began to arrive in Palestine and violently established ation Department, sees the importance of investing their state. In this, the Museum positions itself as in the materiality of cultural practices, even if they a counternarrative not only to Israeli self-deception will always be under existential threat and part and about the persecuted Jews of Europe having arrived parcel of global capital circuits. In reality, the multi- to a land without a people, but also to the PNA’s fram- million dollar investment project that is the Museum ing of the Palestinians as a people whose existence is can neither be defended nor easily rebuilt, should Is- articulated solely in opposition to Israel as is evident rael decide to destroy it at any point. The Museum, in the museum projects in which it is involved.42 like other initiatives in Palestine, whether ‘state’- or In both the Al-Birweh Park/Mahmoud Darwish civil society-led, is vulnerable to the closures, looting Museum and the Yasser Arafat Museum in Ramal- and destruction to which all Palestinian cultural her- lah (opened in 2014 and 2016 respectively), the PNA itage has always been subject. This destruction is a wrests control over narration from the people it gov- possibility that financial investors have had to con- erns in the name of figures who were dominant play- tend with. Sreenan describes the stoic perseverance ers (and narrators) in the Palestinian resistance move- of financial and other investors in the project during ment and, in the case of Arafat, the Palestinian state the dark days of the Gaza slaughter by Israel in 2014 formation project in the aftermath of the Oslo Ac- as ‘possibly one of the most graceful acts of resistance cords. In other words, unlike the Palestinian Museum, one could ever witness’. 40 the emphasis in the PNA’s new multimillion-dollar Hence the question of the museum’s role vis-à- museum projects is more on state power and state vis the power structures it has to counter in the case building than on agency, peoplehood and transter- of Israel and contend with in the case of the PNA ritoriality. More crucially, by focusing on Arafat and was never one about whether its construction would Darwish as the main characters in a story about the in and of itself be a compromise with the post-Oslo Palestinian struggle, the resistance is reified and com- configuration of power. Rather, it was always about modified in ways that are both fathomable on the how it would negotiate with these power structures international stage and productive of nostalgia for in order to position itself as a space of critique, res- the local public. What is insinuated through the aes- istance and decoloniality in the convoluted colonial thetics and narratives of the museums is that these context of Post-Oslo Palestine. As Doumani puts it, figures are part of the struggle for independence from complicating the issue, ‘How this is done, of course, Israel that has supposedly been achieved with the 41 signing of Oslo. They are stories from a glorious past, is of utmost importance’. relics from a bygone era, what Svetlana Boym has In the company of other museums termed a ‘dictatorship of nostalgia’ that reigns at the The Palestinian Museum was first envisioned as a are a chance to critique the past in order to imagine commemorative structure built around a single chronological narrative that begins in 1948. As it developed, it became clear to all those involved that in distancing itself from 1948 as the starting point of a chronological historical narrative, it would reject the standard Zionist line that the notion of a Palestinian people was an idea constructed only after 18 supposed ‘end’ of a conflict.43 Or alternatively, they the future, as the director of the Yasser Arafat Museum suggested when I proposed my cynical reading to him.44 Ultimately, the differing temporal orientations of the Darwish and Arafat Museums dedicated to the past as a way of thinking about the future, on the one hand, and the Palestinian Museum focused on the continuing reality of colonisation, on the other, RADICAL PHILOSOPHY 2.03 / December 2018 are reflected in the way one affectively experiences pite replicating the tools, modes and ideas of western each of the museums. museum construction and maintenance, Gulf states Both the PNA’s museum projects are exercises in have been credited with taking the initiative to de- formal and institutional design that evoke the state’s westernise and decolonise Arab representations by legitimacy. By commissioning the late Ja’afar Tuqan, delinking them from their original source: the west- one of the Arab World’s most renowned modernist ar- ern museum and its historic relationship to the nation chitects – known for his functionalism, simplicity and state in the time of Empire. minimalism expressed in major institutional buildings such as mosques, government offices, banks and schools throughout the Levant and the Arab Gulf over the past forty years – the PNA was asserting its role as the neutral state apparatus representing the public interest. In the case of the Mahmoud Darwish Museum, which is also the ‘temporary’ mausoleum of Palestine’s most loved poet, the small and darkened space that sits atop a mountain of stairs, and which holds most of Darwish’s personal writings and belongings, could be an exhibition space visualising state grandeur anywhere in the world.45 Unlike the Palestinian Museum, there is nothing inside save for the writings and book covers of Darwish’s publications encased on the walls that tells visitors where they are. Formally, this could be a minimalist exhibition anywhere. Yet like the Palestinian Museum, the Darwish Museum also deploys indigenous plants and the terraced gardening typical of the landscape to emphasise Palestinian claims over the land. The role of museums in contributing to visualising national identity is clearly identified in postcolonial literature.46 How political actors make use of these institutions as tools for the conduct of diplomacy or to claim a symbolic significance for the nation-state through the collections that are held within them are matters that relate to the political function of museums and the emotions they conjure up for the communities they represent.47 Yet the building of Palestine’s museums, whether by civil society and private capital or by the state, cannot be fully understood outside of the tide of museum building in the region. Focusing on national identity, societal development and international understanding, museums in the Arab Gulf states of Qatar and the UAE have taken it upon themselves in recent years to redraw Arab and Muslim identity on the global map as part of a larger process of diversifying their oilbased economies by investing in other areas.48 Des- In the words of the decolonial theorist Walter Mignolo, writing about the Qatari Museum of Islamic Art in Doha: ‘What is happening is not merely an imitation of westernisation, but an enactment of dewesternisation in that western cultural standards are being appropriated and adapted to local or regional sensibilities, needs and visions. In the sphere of civilisations and museums, this is a significant departure.’49 The suggestion that he and others have made is that prosperous and stable Arab capitals like Doha, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Muscat have the capability to redraw the global cultural map by redefining the Arab capital in a manner that is neither ‘Eurocentric nor Europhobic; neither retrograde nativist nor rootless cosmopolitan’.50 While there is something to these celebratory and hopeful takes on art infrastructure in the Gulf, what seems to be missing is an examination of how tied up these spaces are in regional geo-politics, economic diversification strategies and military alliances with western powers (evidenced not least by the location of military bases such as those of France in the UAE or the US in Qatar), even if they are seemingly dewesternising art discourses and collecting practices by re-routing the direction of travel and sales of each. 19 Decolonial claims do not seem to factor in the corpor- panies colonialism in Palestine, a new emancipatory ate power that often shapes the conversations that definition of the term may be enunciated. For all its take place in and about museums, even if these mu- faults and the criticism it might incur in the future, seums – especially as in the case of the Gulf museums the Palestinian Museum is ultimately striving to seize – are able to reverse art market trends by paying more control over its destiny not only from its oppressor for artworks than traditional western art patrons, such Israel but also from hegemonic understandings and as the British Museum, are able to today. I would practices of statehood, peoplehood, space, time and argue that this process by itself is not proof that a architecture. For that, it should be celebrated not only decolonial epistemic shift is occurring in the absence as a triumphant moment in the cultural history of the of evidence of the production of one’s own knowledge Palestinian people, but also as a genuinely emancip- on one’s own terms, outside of market constraints. atory moment in the grand project of epistemic de- My reference to other museums in Palestine and the Arab region more generally is not intended to sug- colonisation, for Palestinians and for other colonised peoples everywhere. gest that the Palestinian Museum is somehow more resistant or more worthy as a museum ‘for the people Hanan Toukan is Visiting Professor of Cultural Studies of by the people’. Instead, my point concerns the need to the Middle East at Bamberg University. She is currently start a conversation about the content and form of mu- working on a book manuscript entitled A Global Political: seums in the region that do not fit the emerging Gulf Art, Dissent and Diplomacy in the Arab World, under museum format of massive, powerful symbols of cap- contract with Stanford University Press. ital defined by aesthetically minimalist, white cube styles that are a means to exhume global relevance and centrality. I want to ask how smaller ‘postcolonial’ museums, like the Palestinian Museum, that are not commissioned as part of a larger national strategic plan, intervene in the space of ‘decoloniality’ that the Gulf is ironically now celebrated as spearheading. It is no coincidence that the financial patrons of the Palestinian Museum have made their money in the Gulf. It is also possible that future links between the Palestinian Museum and Gulf museums will be solidified through staff training and other professional and infrastructural development that will be needed as the Palestinian Museum grows. What these links will signify, and how they will shape the direction that the Museum will take, warrant continuing scrutiny and discussion. The Palestinian Museum’s mission of wresting back the narratives, material culture and memories that have been so crudely taken away from the Palestinian people is a reminder of an integral element of decolonisation. If we think of decolonisation in the realm of museum curation as entailing not simply a decentring of the art market and the flows of art sales as suggested in the decolonial claims of Mignolo and others,51 but also a forestalling of the violence of amnesia and narrative erasure that accom- 20 Notes 1. It is not my intention in this article to deal with the programmatic direction, thematic focus and evolving organisational structure of the Museum. Nor do I tackle the Museum’s early exhibitions, ‘Jerusalem Lives’ and ‘Labour of Love: New Approaches to Palestinian Embroidery’, even though they are part of the larger research project from which this article stems. Here, I am interested in the conceptual underpinnings of the museum and how they relate to more general questions about the political economy of art institutions in violent and marginal contexts. 2. Adam Hanieh, ‘The Oslo Illusion,’ Jacobin (April 2013), jacobinmag.com/2013/04/the-oslo-illusion 3. Joseph Massad, ‘The “Post-colonial” Colony: Time, Space, and Bodies in Palestine/Israel’, in The Pre-occupation of Postcolonial Studies, eds. Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2000), 311–46. 4. As I write these words, Palestinians are attempting to come to terms with President Trump’s declaration of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in December 2017, in effect putting an end to the two-state solution and the long discredited Oslo Peace Process. 5. See Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Interpretation of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). 6. See the Museum’s website on this concept: palmuseum.org/about/the-building-2. 7. On the ‘postcolonial museum’, see Alessandra De Angelis, Celeste Ianniciello, Mariangela Orabona and Iain Chambers, eds., The Postcolonial Museum: The Arts of Memory and the Pressures of History (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016); Sonja RADICAL PHILOSOPHY 2.03 / December 2018 Mejcher-Atassi and John Pedro Schwartz, eds., Archives, Museums and Collecting Practices in the Modern Arab World (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), which have paved the way for a reconceptualisation of objects and collections as ‘processes or practices and not just things’; see also Elizabeth Edwards, Chris Gosden and Ruth B. Phillips, eds., Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2006). 8. See for instance Pamela Erskine-Loftus, Victoria Penziner Hightower and Mariam Ibrahim Al-Mulla, eds., Representing the Nation: Heritage, museums, national narratives and identity in the Arab Gulf States (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016); Hayfa Matar ‘Museums as Signifiers in the Gulf’, in Cities, Museums and Soft Power, eds. Gail Dexter Lord and Ngaire Blankenberg (Washington, DC: The AAM Press, 2015). Peggy Levitt, Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015) offers a dynamic approach to understanding museums’ roles as sites of cosmopolitanism in an increasingly transnationalised and global world. 9. The A. M. Qattan Foundation (AMQF) is an independent, not-for-profit developmental organisation working in the fields of culture and education, with a particular focus on children, teachers and young artists. 10. Taawon, accessed 13 March 2018, taawon.org. 11. Artforum, ‘Jack Persekian, Director of Palestinian Museum, resigns’, accessed 19 October 2017, artforum.com/news/jack-persekian-director-of-palestinianmuseum-resigns-56674. 12. Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago, Art Is Not What You Think It Is (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). 13. See for instance Steven Conn, Do Museums Still Need Objects? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Edwards et al., eds., Sensible Objects. 14. Nakba is the Arabic word for catastrophe and Nakba Day (May 15) was officially designated by Yasser Arafat in 1998 as the official day of mourning to coincide with Israel’s official celebration of its establishment in 1948. 15. For Al-Qattan’s criticisms of the global artworld’s approach to cultural production which he sees as ‘far too restricted, abstract, filled with jargon, falsely academic’, see Shany Littman, ‘Even Empty, the new Palestinian Museum Is Making History’, Haaretz, 26 May 2016, haaretz.com/israel-news/culture/.premium-1.721510 16. Esra Akcan, ‘Apology and Triumph: Memory Transference, Erasure, and a Rereading of the Berlin Jewish Museum’, New German Critique 37:2 (2010), 153–179. 17. Artforum, ‘Jack Persekian’; James Glanz and Rami Nazzal, ‘Palestinian Museum Prepares to Open, Minus Exhibitions’, The New York Times, 16 May 2016, nytimes.com/2016/05/17/world/middleeast/palestinianmuseum-birzeit-west-bank.html 18. Zina Jardaneh, chair of the Board of the Palestinian Museum, interview with author, 17 December 2017. 19. ‘New Palestinian museum opens without exhibits’, BBC News, 18 May 2016, bbc.com/news/world-middle-east36322756; William Booth, ‘Palestinian museum opening without exhibits, but creators say that’s no big deal’, The Washington Post, 18 May 2016; ‘Palestinian history museum opens without any exhibits’, Associated Press, 19 May 2016, ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4805141,00.html 20. See for instance Hannah Mermelstein, ‘Overdue Books: Returning Palestine’s “Abandoned Property” of 1948’, Jerusalem Quarterly 47 (2011); Gish Amit, ‘Ownerless Objects? The story of the books Palestinians left behind in 1948’, Jerusalem Quarterly 36 (2009); Sarah Irving, “‘Endangered Archives” program opens up priceless Palestinian heritage’, The Electronic Intifada, 13 May 2014, electronicintifada.net/blogs/sarah-irving/endangered-archives-programopens-pricless-palestinian-heritage 21. The Young Artist Award, named after the late artist Hassan Hourani, is one of the most important events in the visual arts calendar of Palestine and has been organised on a biannual basis by the A.M. Qattan Foundation since 2000. 22. For some who were present at the YAYA ceremony, Al Qattan’s words were harsh generalisations that overlooked the real achievement in getting Palestine on to the world cultural map. For others, Al-Qattan was pushing his audience to think honestly and critically about the global political economy of arts production that Palestinian artists, like artists elsewhere, have had to negotiate with, often at the expense of effacing local historical and ongoing processes of resistance. See Tarek Hamdan, ‘Omar Al-Qattan: Bakae’ya Muta’akhira … Walakin’ (‘Omar Al-Qattan: A Belated Jeremiad … or Not’). Al Akhbar, 26 October 2016. Al-Qattan offered a detailed response to the Al-Akhbar piece, which he saw as wrongfully representing his statement: ‘(Cultural) Palestine Will not Die’, A.M. Qattan Foundation, accessed 19 February 2018, qattanfoundation.org/en/qattan/media/news/omaral-qattan-cultural-palestine-will-not-die. 23. Interview with author, 20 December 2017. 24. Khaled Hourani, ‘Globalisation Questions and Contemporary Art’s Answers: Art in Palestine’, in Globalisation and Contemporary Art, ed. Jonathan Harris (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2009), 301. 25. Lara Khalidi, independent curator from Palestine takes up this point in her paper ‘The Museum Before the Museum’, presented at Harvard Graduate School Quincy School of Design, 6 November 2017. 26. Nasser Abourahme, ‘The Bantustan Sublime: Reframing the Colonial in Ramallah’, City 13:4 (2009), 499–509. 27. Adam Hanieh, Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 28. Sherene Seikaly, Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016). 29. Levitt, Artifacts and Allegiances, 8. 30. Lara Zureikat, phone interview with author, 23 November 2017. 31. Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso, 2012), 120. 32. Conor Sreenan, phone interview with author, 5 December 2017. 21 33. Omar Al-Kattan, phone interview with author, 17 December 2017. 34. For the curators’ description of the project and its content, see Kristine Khouri and Rasha Salti, ‘Past Disquiet: From Research to Exhibition’, Artl@s Bulletin 5:1 (2016), Article 8. 35. This conversation was part of an exchange I had with Soumi and others on a panel titled ‘Before the Museum’, for which I was invited to be the discussant, as part of the symposium Shifting Ground: The Underground Is Not the Past held at the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre as part of the Sharjah Biennial 13: Tamawuj chapter held in Ramallah between 10-14 August 2017. 36. For instance, the Museum is currently running two projects, ‘Palestinian Journeys’ and the ‘Palestinian Museum Digital Archive’, that constitute a large part of the open access digital platform that will collect, organise and archive Palestinian history in Palestine. See, palmuseum.org/projects/e-platforms-1. 37. For an earlier take on the changing scope and content of the decolonisation process, see Jan Nederveen Pieterse and Bhikhu Parekh, eds., The Decolonisation of Imagination: Culture, Knowledge and Power (London: Zed Books, 1995). 38. Ursula Biemman, ‘A Post-Territorial Museum: Interview with Beshara Doumani’, ArteEast Quarterly, 1 February 2010, arteeast.org/quarterly/a-post-territorialmuseum/?issues_season=spring&issues_year=2010. 39. I am not suggesting that this approach is the Palestinian Museum’s alone. Since the late 1990s many museums have invested in an online presence by incorporating a wide range of web-based formats into their programmes and exhibits to enable access by a global public. 40. Conor Sreenan, skype interview with author, 5 December 2017. 41. Beshara Doumani, informal discussion with author, Providence, RI, 4 December 2017. 42. I want to stress here that this counternarrative is extremely important and necessary insofar as it responds to Israel’s military and Zionist discursive narrative that attempts to erase the Palestinian people. However, there is a need to go beyond the defensive. As Doumani puts it, ‘how can Palestinians take control of and shape their own narratives, but not in a defensive mechanical way that simply responds to how they are represented by others?’(Biemman, ‘A PostTerritorial Museum’.) 43. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 354. 44. Mohammad Halayka, interview with author, Ramallah, 23 May 2018. 22 45. Both the mausoleums of Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Darwish are generally regarded as temporary in anticipation of the day when they can be transplanted to Jerusalem, the occupied capital city that Palestinians, like Israelis, perceive as theirs. 46. Rodney Harrison and Lotte Hughes, ‘Heritage, Colonialism and Postcolonialism’, in Understanding the Politics of Heritage, ed. Rodney Harrison (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). 47. Clive Gray, The Politics of Museums (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Melissa Nisbett, ‘New perspectives on instrumentalism: an empirical study of cultural diplomacy’, International Journal of Cultural Policy 19:5 (2013), 557–575. It is also interesting to take note of a roundtable discussion conducted between Jack Persekian, the former director of the Palestinian Museum, curator Lara Khalidi and artist Yazan Khalil, on the nature of a museum in the context of a state that does not exist. Khalidi questions whether Palestinians are able to creatively take advantage of their non-state status to interrogate other forms of political existence that the museum could experiment with. The one point that Persekian goes back to is that the museum is a civil society project that does not intend to represent the state but rather, works in parallel to it. See Muqaddima fi al Mathaf al Falastinya (Welfare Association and the Palestinian Museum, 2014), 10–14. 48. Suzi Mirgani, ‘Introduction: Art and Cultural Production in the GCC’, Journal of Arabian Studies 7:1 (2017). 49. Walter Mignolo, ‘Enacting the Archives, Decentering the Muses: The Museum of Islamic Art in Doha and the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore’, Ibraaz Platform 006 (2013), 11–12, ibraaz.org/usr/library/documents/main/enacting-thearchives.pdf. 50. Hamid Dabashi, ’Rethinking the Arab capital through art’, Al Jazeera, 10 April 2017, aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2017/04/rethinking-arabcapital-art-170409105111270.html and ‘What are the Saudis afraid of?’, Al Jazeera, 17 December 2017, www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/saudis-afraid171217082544270.html 51. Mignolo’s understanding of decoloniality (as opposed to decolonisation) is closely linked to the process of ‘delinking’ as he expounds it in ‘Delinking: The rhetoric of modernity, the logic of coloniality and the grammar of de-coloniality’, Cultural Studies 21:2-3 (2007): 449–514. Here he refers to a process that leads to decolonial epistemic shifts that propose alternative universalities or what he terms ‘pluriversality’ as a universal project (453). RADICAL PHILOSOPHY 2.03 / December 2018