The Counter-Archive
The Counter-Archive project provides a reading of the Palestinian landscape as an ever-changing space that carries within it layers of memory, uprooting and transformation, reshaping our relationship with the place at every stage. The project takes us back to the pre-Oslo period, tracking the accumulations witnessed in the landscape over the years up to our present context, and extending this timeline more than fifty years into the future. The project aims to use the near future as a testing ground through which we can review the past, while also examining the current status of the place and what it could become.
Over the course of three months of research, analysis, development, and production, five female artists explored the project's central question through different entry points. Research pathways varied, spanning memory and what resists its erasure, the narrowing space (which shrinks the possibilities of movement and imagination), and stones with layers of meaning accumulated within them. They also examined things uprooted from their context, changed, and then returned there, alongside the visual language that shapes our daily relationship with roads, movement, and arrival. The included artworks come together in an attempt to present five possibilities, all of which were based on an existing trace in the present, aiming to push it into a time we have not yet reached.
The artworks in the exhibition were distributed across Jerusalem, Ramallah, Bethlehem, and the Galilee, with each work existing within a space that intersects with the nature and context of its production. Meanwhile, the effects of the artistic process are gathered in a single archival platform at the Leila Miqdadi Al-Qattan Library in Al-Qattan Cultural Centre in Ramallah. This platform collects photographs, maps, documents, writings, comments, and research materials, preserved and organized within files and codes to form another layer that showcases the journey of artistic exploration up to this moment.
In “The Counter-Archive,” the past and the future stand in close proximity. We look back at what has occurred, alongside foreseeing the details of what might happen, in an attempt to archive five possibilities that intersect with the Palestinian landscape before the artworks themselves become part of the place’s memory.
Artwork Texts:
Noran Joulani – The Sixth Artwork
Over the course of three months of the Counter-Archive dialogue programme, there was the accumulation of photographs, maps, documents, texts, notes, references, and attempts—some reaching the final artwork stage, while others remained part of the research journey. The Sixth Artwork is composed of materials that were uncovered, sorted, and rearranged into dedicated files, with each material carrying a code and a location within an archive that documents the trajectory of each work and the transformations it underwent. The Sixth Artwork archives the process of imagination, what was sought, what was found, what changed, what remained, and what contributed to reaching these five possibilities, looking beyond the final version of the encompassed artworks. In this way, the platform becomes an archive of something that has not yet happened—an attempt to preserve the trace of a moment in which the future began to take shape.
Darina Jabr – On a Brighter Tomorrow, I Will Go There
The journey begins at a bus stop—a familiar place where we wait to reach another destination. But here, destinations are not bound by the borders we know. Instead, road signs, bus schedules, and route numbers transform into a navigation system for an imagined geography, allowing us to reach Haifa, Jaffa, and Beirut, and to traverse the road of roses without the journey being preceded by questions about checkpoints, permits, or accessibility.
By redesigning the language of public transportation, the work constructs a small utopia where freedom of movement seems completely normal and self-evident. Beginning as a simple blueprint for a bus journey, it transforms into imagining another geography for a post-liberation Palestine—one that may not exist yet, but which we can begin to reach simply by imagining it
Shatha Safi – Shrinkage
This work emanates from the concept of "shrinkage," where a space can contract without any change to its geographical dimensions—as seen in the Palestinian experience. Checkpoints, walls, bypasses, and overcrowding reshape our relationship with space, causing nearby places to become distant, short roads to become long, and spatial limitations to extend beyond movement and access to encompass memory, relationships, and the capacity to imagine the future.
This artwork projects the Palestinian reality across eighty years by imagining two possible pathways: either the shrinkage continues until movement becomes mere repetition within a closed space, or the space reclaims its capacity for expansion, movement, and choice. Between these two possibilities, a question lingers: when space shrinks around us, does only our sphere of movement contract, or does the realm of our imagination and the prospects of our future also shrink along with it?
Ikhlas Sawalha – Talismans of Memory
Talismans of Memory stems from the archival of writings and handicrafts that emerged from Israeli occupation prisons after the October 7 War. Among them are writings and a rosary that survived the threat of annihilation, bearing the traces of attempts to preserve imagination and memory in another place where no control is imposed over one’s body, space, and time.
This work deals with the materials not merely as documents that narrate events, but as a trace of methods developed by women prisoners to confront Occupation and refuse memory erasure. It represents the construction of a future memory through writing, encryption, and the creation of ways to protect what could survive—an archive of a memory striving to reach the outside world.
Haya Qawar, Stone, Paper, Bullets
This work traces the vital role of stones in Palestinian life through five themes: "house, toy, rubble, resistance tool, and grave." It is presented through a book containing four layers: the past, the present, linguistic vocabulary, and an imagined future. Through this exploration, a stone moves between these positions, its function and significance shifting with its changing reality.
The segment dedicated to the future features an interactive work driven by audience engagement and collective production. It challenges the viewers’ imagination, prompting them to map an imaginary, speculative future of stones in a post-Occupation Palestine: How will stones permeate our lives then? What will be liberated within these stones, and what will remain trapped? And can the five themes be reduced to just three: house, toy, death?
Yamama Khalidi — From Whom to Where?
This work stems from research in the "Forest" area of the town of Basmat Tab'un, utilizing a photo archive dating back to 2012. The artist traces objects that appeared within that space, re-examining their relationship with it. This process unfolds across several stages: uprooting these objects from their place, reshaping them and imagining other possibilities, then returning them to the same place with different functions, values, and meanings. Thus, the surroundings remain identical while only the object changes. Within this movement, the artist treats objects as bodies carrying the experience of the place, linking their uprooting and return to the history of her mother’s family, who were displaced from that area and later returned to it after the place had changed—transforming their relationship to it.
This artwork was formulated as a collage book that combines archives, maps, pictures, symbols, and imagined materials for the future of objects in the "Forest" area. By placing the documented alongside imagined and potential things through a specific sequence, the artist does not merely ask what the object was and what it is now, but rather what it could become—and what possibilities it holds if it were removed from its place and then returned there in a different form. Here, the future does not arrive as a ‘ready-made’ image of the place; rather, it takes shape from possibilities and the capacity to return laden with new meanings.