The MD Museum of Palestine

Darwish – the man, the poet, the author, the name, the statue, the homeland, the exile, the displacement. Palestine – the colonized, the hope, the defeat, the desire, the thought, the will, the map, the forgetfulness, the regret, the history, the nation, the god, the identity, the intensity, the struggle, the liberation, the culture, the capture, the dream, the patriarchy, the voice, the image, the narcissism, the presence, the absence, the seeking, the universal, the commodification, the embodiment, the independence, the remnants, the player, the siege, the passport, the fetish, the forced residency, the symbol, the metaphor, the immortal, or shall we say the eternal?

In light of all these notions, words, metaphors, concepts, and the monumentalization of the poet Darwish, we propose to initiate a new future with Mahmoud Darwish, through the notions, the terms, the conditions of language in the vanishing horizons of Palestine. We think of a museum consisting only of a communication department for subverting communication, transforming it into a creation, a crack in language, where meaning redistributes itself in space, into Palestinian towns and villages, addressing and opening a space in everyday life for poetry to reconsider questions ¾ questions that, in order to be formulated and addressed, new terms and terminologies would need to be excavated or invented in order for new modes of being in Palestine to sprout, for new voices to blossom.The title of Perennial Tensions is taken from the book by Khaled Mattawa, Mahmoud Dawish: The Poet’s Art and His Nation (Syracuse University Press, 2014), pp. 1–13.

Project Video

About Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri

Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri are two artists who have taken an interest in art as a space for moving away from communication, information, news, journalism, facts, products, and knowledge as something abstracted from life and experience, sensations and perceptions, affections and becomings, and moving toward an engendering of sense-abilities, communicat-abilities that overcome the borders and barriers that prohibit movements of bodies, forces, flight, and thoughts that seek to affirm earth and worlds as occasions of a profound sharing beyond any property, including, and above all, the self as individual, place as possession, life as pre-defined, coloniality as pre-condition, capitalism as reality, patriarchy as universal, and the proper name itself