To be a Palestinian in the diaspora today is to miss one’s home, one's family members left behind, and to simultaneously enjoy the privilege of distance while also mourn for a place that’s being hurt. It, too, is to possess a luxury that is missing from the land itself: that of choice. A new exhibition set in Bantry, Co Cork, attempts to depict what this tension does to a person, with work full of sharp contrasts –– sorrow, light; the past, the present ––reminding the viewer of the ongoing nature of Palestinian activism, and indeed that it wasn’t always like this.
The result is Art Under Fire, an exhibition organised in partnership with the Palestine Museum US, a building located a short drive from Yale University in Woodbridge, Connecticut. Founded in 2018 by Faisal Saleh, a Palestinian businessman who left the West Bank for Pennsylvania at 17, the museum’s mission is to “tell a Palestinian story to a global audience.” Saleh’s family were originally displaced in the aftermath of the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, an event Palestinians refer to as the ‘Nakba’ (catastrophe).
“In 2018 the Western Hemisphere did not have a single museum dedicated to Palestinian art, so it was significant that Palestinians had a voice in this part of the world, particularly as it’s a place where mainstream media seems to be unsympathetic to Palestine and Palestinians,” says Saleh. The free exhibition currently on at Marino Church, comprised of 14 can.