PALESTINIAN MUSEUM’S INAUGURAL EXHIBITION SUSPENDED
After recently acquiring a new director, the Palestinian Museum is set to open in the West Bank this week, albeit without an opening exhibition to display, according to a report by James Glanz and Rami Nazzal at the New York Times. The inaugural show, “Never Part,” which was to feature artifacts of Palestinian refugees, has been suspended following a disagreement between the museum’s board and its former director, Jack Persekian, which led to Persekian’s dismissal last December.
The President of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas and other dignitaries are invited to the new museum’s opening ceremony, but a spokeswoman has acknowledged that for the event “there will not be any artwork exhibited in the museum at all” and it will instead celebrate the completion of the building. The ceremony happens also to be slated a few days after the sixty-eigth anniversary of what is known to Palestinians as the Nakba—Israel’s founding and the conflict that followed.
The museum’s chairman, Omar al-Qattan, said Palestinians were “so in need of positive energy” that it seemed better to open, even with an empty building. The inaugural exhibition was developed over several years by Persekian and was to feature artistic interpretations of objects such as keys and photographs that Palestinians around the world have kept from the homes they fled or were forced to accede to the growth of Israel. Persekian says he agreed to leave his post after the museum’s senior management informed him that it no longer favored the project, but he said he did not know why their attitudes changed: “I can’t fathom what happened.”
Qattan attests that his team decided Persekian had not built sufficient expertise among staff members during his three and a half year tenure at the museum, and that outside artists had criticized his concept for the exhibition, saying “we didn’t feel that what was delivered was up to scratch” of Persekian’s work.
The museum will be open to the public free of charge starting June 1, and will also open a “satellite exhibition” in Beirut at the end of this month, titled “At the Seams: A Political History of Palestinian Embroidery.” Qattan has stated the exhibition there would be the first of many such exhibitions they will hold outside the West Bank, due to the difficulty in accessing the area.
This is not the first time the former director has courted controversy. In 2011 Persekian was abruptly fired as director from the tenth edition of the Sharjah Biennial by Sheikh Sultan bin Mohammad al-Qasimi due to a work by Algerian artist Mustapha Benfodil that provoked widespread complaints and criticism from young Emirati citizens. Benfodil’s work was subsequently removed from the biennial.
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