“Witnessing Palestine: On Apartheid, Censorship, and the Counter-Archive,” Wasafiri, October 15, 2026, commissioned in tandem with Wasafiri 127: Solidarities.
This essay positions contemporary art as a vital facet of our necessary, collective witnessing of Palestine. It considers questions around memorial culture, acknowledging both the importance of publicly memorialising victims of oppression and the fact that collective memory is frequently politically manipulated so as to suppress any historical evidence that does not fit a state-sanctioned narrative. To this end, I interweave personal vignettes related to my experience of un/learning the Zionist mythologisation of Israel. In light of such distortions, the essay shows how contemporary artists have engaged both in the production of counter-archives (by recording the forgotten names, cultural artefacts, and cartographies of Palestinian history) and in sustaining communal memory of the ‘named and unnamed alike’, as Samudzi puts it. Art can offer, in other words, many paths towards the performance of ‘wake work’, to borrow Christina Sharpe’s term for practices of care and mourning in the aftermath (and ongoingness) of collective trauma. Contemporary art is uniquely positioned to facilitate the kinds of poetic experiences in which personal growth, ‘seeing in the dark’, and new seeds of solidarity can take root.
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article on the Wasafiri website.
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