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.