Opening: Thursday, 22 October at 7 pm
What happens to a visual culture when the places, institutions and archives through which it remembers itself are systematically dismantled?
What Is Erased Cannot Be Erased approaches Palestinian visual art as a living ecosystem of memory, structured through five interconnected pillars: Gaza, Jerusalem, the West Bank, the 1948 territories and exile. These are not separate geographies, but connected sites through which images, histories, artistic practices and collective memory circulate. When one is ruptured, the effects reverberate across the others.
Bringing together artists working across these spaces, the exhibition explores how visual memory persists through displacement, rupture and loss. Painting, drawing, photography, video and installation become traces, testimonies and fragments of an informal archive.
The exhibition does not attempt to reconstruct what has been erased. Instead, it makes visible the practices through which artists continue to remember, transmit and create – in the aftermath of, and amidst, destruction. Across generations, art carries fragments across time and place, keeping memory in motion when the conditions for preserving it have been violently disrupted.
Artists from Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem and in exile: Mohammad Abu Sal, Raed Issa, Bayan Abu Nahla, Sohail Salem, Yazan Abu Salamah, Bashar Khalaf, Rawan Joulani, Marwa Bakri, Hamada Maddah, Giovanna Ranaldi.
Curatorial team: Manar Idrissi, Nora Ancarola, Pamela Martínez Rod