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Rana Abdulla’s phone is constantly ringing as she walks around the Mennonite Heritage Centre Gallery at Canadian Mennonite University. Each time, it is someone else with something to contribute to the new exhibition that she has worked for months to curate and arrange – a jallayeh from a family ceremony, a photograph of a parent.
It is hard to imagine where Abdulla and the rest of the curation team could find the room to place more artwork. The gallery is full to bursting with visual art, interactive pieces and various articles of clothing, each of which makes up The Land Remembers (subtitled Palestine: Courage, Resilience Resistance), an exhibition that shares the humanity of the Palestinian lived experience from the joy to the grief, the diaspora across the world to contemporary experiences in Gaza and the West Bank.
Much of Abdulla’s own lived experience is on display. Joy and sorrow hang side by side in the form of her grandmother’s wedding dress and her mother-in-law’s belongings from her journey on foot to escape Palestine to Jordan in 1967.
“They live with me. Their memories are eternal,” Abdulla says, sharing her hope that people will see her experience as a human one that lives beyond headlines and historical representations.
Even sharing reflections of the Palestinian experience through an artistic lens is one that Abdulla notes has been very challenging. “Our art has been narrowly framed in very restrictive and ethnic lenses,” she says. “This very thing led to the marginalization of Palestinian art due to censorship and institutional pressure. The Land Remembers exhibition is engaging on Palestinian art and how it is like the fabric: the aesthetic of it, the beauty of it, all the memories [placed] into those fabrics.”
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The memories placed within all of the artworks in The Land Remembers were collected by a community group of Palestinian artists who approached the MHC Gallery over a year ago. “It’s been such a privilege to work with artists and makers who are really committed to their community and to sharing their stories and their lived experiences,” says gallery curator Sarah Hodges-Kolisnyk.
As much as beauty has been woven into the textile pieces in The Land Remembers that come from places like Bethlehem, Ramallah and other Palestinian communities, so too has conflict and resilience. The gallery made the choice to include that element of the artists’ experiences as well, including a replica checkpoint that visitors walk through to enter the gallery, an interactive art piece that remembers the thousands of children who have been killed in Gaza over the last couple of years as well as with materials from local protests in solidarity for Palestine. “I didn’t think we could ignore that part of the message in giving space to the Palestinian artists,” says Hodges-Kolisnyk.
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For Abdulla, all the pieces in The Land Remembers stand as both art and archive. “It’s such beautiful art,” she says, “and also, it’s preservation and preventing our existence from being erased, because we always fight against our erasure as Palestinians.”
Given the difficulty in finding institutional support for this cultural preservation, Abdulla is keen to share her gratitude to the MHC Gallery for their willingness to showcase these works. “Those acts of solidarity… that makes us hopeful. That makes us feel that we are equal, that there are people who are just as loving in this world, that people understand the extraordinary hardship that Palestinians go through,” she shares. “This was an act of courage, and we are extremely grateful.”
The Land Remembers is on display at the Mennonite Heritage Centre Gallery until February 28. Hours and more information can be found at the gallery’s website.
