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2008

• Palestine 1948 - Remembering a past homeland
• Exhibition ’24-Hour Indonesia’
• Travelling Tales
• Tropenmuseum shows Haiti’s most important collection of vodou artefacts
• The Chocolate Expedition, photos by Frits Lemaire
• Tropenmuseum brings unique collection of vodou artefacts to the Netherlands
• Wayang Superstar - the theatre world of Ki Enthus Susmono

Palestine 1948 - Remembering a past homeland

In the Arab world, the year 1948 is known as the year of the Nakba. The word means catastrophe and it describes the exodus of the Palestinians following the establishment of the State of Israel. In fact, Nakba is about more than one historical event; it also refers to the subsequent exile and the sense of loss and alienation that followed: to the longing for a homeland that no longer existed.

‘Palestine 1948: Remembering a past homeland’ presents the recollection of this phenomenon from a Palestinian perspective. The exhibition comprises four sections, connected by the central theme of ‘memory and loss’: the memory of a historical event, a culture and a homeland that was lost. Chronologically, the show starts with historical photos by Khalil Raad (1854-1957). They give a sense of everyday life in Palestine in the 1920s.

Memories on film

The main section of the exhibition consists of personal stories of Palestinian refugees of 1948. In recently filmed video interviews they tell their personal, often deeply emotional stories, about how they experienced the war, about their escape and about how it feels to be exiled.

This material comes from the Nakba Archive, a collective project maintained by international researchers based in Beirut. In recent years numerous interviews have been recorded on video with first-generation Palestinian refugees, currently amounting to around 1,000 hours of video material. The aim is to keep the memory alive of the otherwise poorly documented Nakba and of life in Palestine before 1948.

Homeland lost

In addition to the Nakba Archive films, the show features contemporary and historical photos. For two years, American photographer Alan Gignoux compiled photos of Palestinian refugees and combined these with contemporary pictures of the precise locations they had left in 1948 in a project entitled ‘Homeland Lost’. In one of his photos, for example, he shows the former mosque in today’s Caesarea, which currently serves as a cafeteria.

By juxtaposing Gignoux’s photos with the historical photos of Khalil Raad (1854–1957), the exhibition shows the extent of the change that has taken place in the intervening sixty years. In some cases the past has literally been erased.

Visions of the future

The video art of the Palestinian Jumana Emil Abboud (b. 1971), a resident of Jerusalem, expresses the longing for a homeland while at the same time raising the issue of the possibility, or impossibility of return. ‘Al-Awda’ (2002) shows a woman wandering in a wood. As in the fairytale, she tries to mark the way back by leaving a trail of bread crumbs. But her journey - a search of a home - is endless: the video shows her going over the same ground again and again in a continual loop.

Press photos