- by PV Cultural Bureau
- The Guardian
- Issue #2203
Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Winnipeg, Canada. Photo: Tony Hisgett – flickr.com (CC BY 2.0)
After over a decade of concerted lobbying by the Palestinian community, and four years of development with Palestinian Canadians including the Canadian Palestinian Association of Manitoba and the Palestinian Canadian Academic and Artists Network, Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present officially opened on 27 June at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) in Winnipeg.
The exhibition’s existence is an extremely important development in the midst of an ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people, and it follows the Palestinian-Canadian community’s longstanding efforts to have Palestinian experiences – including the Nakba reality of brutal multi-generational ethnic cleansing enacted by the British and Israeli states – featured within the institution’s narratives.
Palestine Uprooted also offers up the most jarring of contradictions: an exhibition that confronts Israel’s genocide, mounted and supported by an institution of the Canadian state, while the Canadian state is itself still actively supporting that genocide.
In a press release, CMHR CEO Isha Khan stated that the story of the Nakba “belongs in the collective memory of Canadians.” To the museum’s credit, and as the exhibit’s title and location in the “Rights Today” gallery reflects, the ongoing nature of the Nakba is a particular point of emphasis.
This despite the fact that ongoing Zionist efforts to shut down the exhibit reached unprecedented heights in the weeks and days ahead of the opening. Amplified by mass media, Zionist groups in Canada and the US, as well as the Israeli state, pressure on the museum to suspend the exhibit even before anyone had seen it was intense, but could not overcome the immense public support.
The exhibit itself contains five thematic testimonials from Palestinians addressing the displacement and its impacts, and features accompanying deeds, artefacts, artwork and broader framing materials. These include projections of the current destruction of Gaza, photographs of displaced Palestinians, a didactic panel on the occupation, and the 2001 poem Think of Others by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.
Among the featured objects are original iron keys that have become a central symbol of the Palestinian struggle, in this case from the family of testimonial contributor Rana Abdulla.
Palestinians driven from their homes have held these keys to the houses they were forced from, and have passed them down through families for generations. Not only are they a powerful symbol of return, but they are also a material assertion of its potential realisation.
The testimonials movingly describe the uprooting of Palestinian families from their lands, the destruction of communities and the multi-generational impacts of this trauma, as well as the resistance to cultural erasure that Palestinians have faced. Recorded in 2022, they make up the heart of the exhibition; as intimate narratives of displacement, separation, violence and, notably, reflections on the broader cultural experience, they emphasise the direct personal costs of violent colonisation and its impacts throughout diaspora communities.
