Communist Museum of Palestine دال-صفر (d-0)

The Communist Museum of Palestine is an ongoing effort of questioning and reimagining the uses and forms of art, knowledge, and its institutions by centering communal care, shared study, and solidarity. 

The museum has unfolded through successive phases, examining how communities, using a basic communist ethic (from each according to their abilities to each according to their needs) can reimagine other possibilities for life, for art, for learning, and their infrastructures of support.  

This search is rooted in the conviction that there is no future for planetary life without delinking from the ongoing forms of perpetrating/denying the Nakba (the Palestinian catastrophe that was started already before 1948). Here, the Nakba is understood not only in its specificity of structured oblivion, obliteration, and denial of Palestinian life and the violence that Palestinians have been enduring for over a century, but also as an invitation to consider through various histories, across geographies, and communities how that violent structure of the Nakba and its concomitant forms of violence/denial have been imposed on a planetary scale. 

With دال-صفر (d-0), the Communist Museum of Palestine enters its fourth and most critical phase of reclamation and dissemination, in a process by which its very premises will be intensified, communalised, and tested transcommunally. 

The P1-Mobile Studio will host the museum’s d-school, comprised of a series of encounters, seminars, meetings, programmes, disseminating materials, publications, and explorations of what art can (un)do in the face of genocidal violence. The museum’s activities in Bergen include a city-wide exhibition of donated artworks offered by artists in solidarity with both Palestine itself and the ongoing struggles to delink from the cultures perpetrating and denying the Nakba. This effort invites the city’s residents and community organisations to host these works in homes and shared spaces, creating not only an exhibition of solidarity with Palestine but also a chance to animate this decentralised and communally cared for convivial museum. Drawing on the experience of Palestinian communities, who have for centuries nourished and maintained a rich tapestry of cultural practices, forms, ethics of neighbouring, and poetic knowledges, the Communist Museum of Palestine treats the museum not as a fixed or centralised archive but as a living form that moves with people and attends to their needs, conditions, struggles, life making, and forming practices.

The museum’s d-school programme is animated by Munir Fasheh, Mandaloun and Dahaleez art collectives, Rana Anani, Rana Batrawi, Mezna Qato, Ayreen Anastas, Rene Gabri, Peter Makhlouf, and many other friends as well as friends to come.

The Communist Museum of Palestine is a proposal to destitute the model of the museum in its current form, reclaiming a communist ethics by instituting a real decolonial movement in Palestine and beyond. Along with friends and interested collaborators, the museum and its caregivers propose to reconstruct a real museum in Palestine over the coming years, communising, decolonising, deterritorialising, deconstructing, decentring, destituting, displacing, and abolishing the very sense and use of a museum as it exists today, as well as its imperial and colonial geneses. It introduces permeability to the existing separations between creators, caretakers, objects, and practices of safekeeping or value, and their respective beholders.

Inviting and collecting works produced and shared by artists, hosting them within the domestic or communal spaces of everyday people and everyday objects, the Communist Museum of Palestine is an investigation into the possibilities of maintaining a decolonised and decentralised archive cared for by communities. 

It offers the possibility to reimagine and reclaim other futures for art and life from the experiences of colonised, racialised peoples, and through a historic and contemporary understanding of their struggles for a freedom no longer premised on an other’s unfreedom.

Izz Aljabari (b. 1990, Bethlehem) is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher working at the intersection of contemporary art, local knowledge, and heritage. He leads the Rawhi Studio 1956 Archive, a large-scale project preserving Hebron’s visual memory, and co-founded the Mandaloun Lab for Experimental Arts. His practice explores memory, fragmentation, and spatial transformation through sculpture, installation, and archival research.

Munir Fasheh is a learning practitioner based in Ramallah. He taught mathematics and physics at Birzeit University in the 1960s and 1970s. During the First Intifada, he founded the Tamer Institute for Community Education as a centre for learning outside of institutional education in Palestine. He holds a PhD in Education from Harvard University where he founded and directed the Arab Education Forum (AEF) in 1997. Since 2007, he has been working with groups in Palestine and Jordan to establish ways of collaborative learning. Since 2018, he has been involved with JOHUD, an organisation whose vision comprises mujaawarah, wisdom, and the natural nurturing of soils.

Shahd Itbakhi (b. 1997, Hebron) is a bold, dissident artist and conservator. Working across video, performance, and visual art, she interrogates the boundaries of the possible, aiming to make her art a communicative politics that engages with the world. Her work examines how circumstances shape collective experiences of stability and turmoil, challenging hegemonic power structures. She is a member of the Mandaloun Experimental Arts Lab.

Peter Makhlouf (b. 1995, Boston) is a writer whose work centers on the imbrication of culture, political economy and colonial violence in the world(s) between Palestine and Germany. He is the Director-in-Exile of the Falafel School, a roving troupe of dissidents and Pulcinelle devoted to unlearning the critically denialist theories of the postwar world. His (dés)œuvre has appeared in a wide range of fora including Res, Jerusalem Quarterly, Radical History Review and Archiv für Mediengeschichte.

The Mandaloun Experimental Arts Lab was founded in Hebron by Izz Aljabari, Alaa Abu Haikal, and Rani Al-Sharbati as a portal for experimental arts, crafts, and local knowledge. It serves as a platform to explore the intersections between art, memory, and indigenous ways of knowing, while supporting younger generations in reconnecting with their city and cultural history through creative practices.

Mezna Qato (1976, Tulkarm) is a historian, writer, and organiser based between Cambridge, Chicago, and Tulkarm. Her work is primarily concerned with histories, lives, and movements of dispossessed and exiled communities. Her thinking on archives, education, destruction and regeneration appears in journals, blogs, zines, letters, placards, emails, videos, and post-it notes. She is co-convenor of the 'Archives of the Disappeared' Initiative, is a member of Librarians and Archivists with Palestine, the US Palestinian Community Network, British Palestinian Committee, and other formations, visible and not so visible. Her collaborative artistic work has been shown in, among other places, Venice, New York, Liverpool, Ramallah, Glasgow, and Amman.

Rani Al-Sharabati (b. 1998, Hebron) is a Palestinian visual artist, educator, and cultural organizer with a Master’s degree in Contemporary Art. He founded Murtsam Art Studio in Hebron, the city’s first space for residencies, workshops, and training. His work has been shown locally and internationally, including a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. He contributes to contemporary Palestinian art by creating spaces where personal experience, memory, and artistic experimentation intersect.

… is the name of an artist or several artists whose names have been withdrawn. The unfolding genocide in Palestine, in this moment of intensification, bears certain responsibilities. Among them, the acute and necessary refusal to be a tool or cover for the normalization of such unspeakable acts of mass cruelty and death. Language, words, names in withdrawal are not in this case a cowering from that assuming of responsibility but possibly its very condition of possibility.