A Question of Decolonization in the Curation of Cultural Content in Palestine
BY HIBA BURQAN (Research Assistant - Children’s Museology Cluster)
September 5, 2025
Palestinian culture is an interconnected mesh of knowledge and practices deeply rooted in the direct interaction between family members and their land. This historic interconnection forms the foundation of Palestinian social systems and cultural values. For example, a family that owns an olive grove follows a traditional seasonal calendar centered around the first rainfall in October, which is associated with the cultivation of olives. Their calendar extends to include associated cultural practices such as picking olives, squeezing oil, and making soap. Their social system is centered around a way of living that allows for the achievement of these cultural practices such as living within an extended family form.
As colonialism and capitalism penetrated the Palestinian way of living, the local knowledge and practices found ways to live within new forms of culture. For instance, instead of the Dabke Dance being solely used for special family events, it developed into a popular performing art that could take place on stages and in theatres. Similarly, instead of wearing the traditional cross-stitched embroidery dress (Thoub) on special occasions, Palestinian women celebrate the cross-stitched art as ornamental add-ons to their everyday garments.
In Palestine, the curation of cultural content varies considerably between institutional and community-based projects. In most institutions, such as museums and cultural centres, Palestinian knowledge and values are overlooked when curating cultural content. For example, in object-based exhibits such as the display of an old olive press, local artifacts are usually displayed in glass cabinets and behind barriers as a representation of the past, without mentioning the present and future applications of that technology. They also impose out-of-context cultural values that reflect top-down Eurocentric processes of how “modern” culture and art should be produced, such as the academic language used in open calls that allows for a limited number of participants to attain the calls’ requirements. Denying the values that shaped the culture in the past could lead to the loss of cultural practices, knowledge, and forms in the future. Moreover, replacing local values with foreign production processes could create a gap between institutional and local ways of knowing.
A framed embroidery artwork showing the scenes of the Palestinian traditional wedding including the Dabkeh dance. This artwork is a very common piece to be hung in Palestinian homes. This particular photo was taken in my own home in Palestine. Photo credit: Hiba Burqan.
This essay is not a call to romanticize the past, but rather a call to embrace the fact that the past is still present in everyday Palestinian behaviors, practices, choices, and visual language. It is also a call to decolonize museum practices and utilize more local approaches that could ensure the reflection of the perspectives and voices of the Palestinian culture. From my observations over nearly two decades as a cultural worker in Palestine, while museum floors are abandoned, community members and families choose to spend their free time actively participating in public and private cultural activities such as street fairs, festivals, dance shows, music performances, pottery making, cross-stitching, henna tattooing, olive picking, and many other living practices. Many Palestinian cultural institutions, such as cultural museums, are looking away from that rich contemporary cultural content. Instead, they are focusing on archaic content that highlights narratives of victimhood and cultural loss, which interests and benefits a few individuals and satisfies the goals of external international donors. Usually, these types of funds are associated with terms and conditions that privilege “high culture” epistemologies over local popular ways of knowing, while simultaneously drowning the institution in bureaucratic processes that drain the cultural workers and financial resources. Moreover, such donors impose so-called “conditional funding”, which dictates the boundaries of the content and the characteristics of the individuals allowed to be involved in the curation process. Yielding to these conditions deprives institutions of autonomous decision-making while providing increased financial capacity and implementation power, labeling them as “elite” institutions in the local cultural arena. It is infuriating to realize that such institutions have the power to allocate land, buildings, human power, and funds, while local cultural workers who function outside of those institutions struggle to maintain their practices within the scarcity of resources.
Some Palestinian cultural centres and collectives are finding progressive alternatives to elitist, exclusive models of curatorship, such as museum and artifact-centred exhibitions. Those alternative processes focus on the co-production of knowledge with local communities in their contexts, creating a continuum of knowledge production and dissemination across different generations. For example, in collaboration with Sakiya Academy, Prof. Nida Sinnokrot conducted a course in 2019 where he spent a couple of weeks with his students at the village of Ein-Qinya, in which they researched and developed conceptual designs for the agricultural watch tower used by community members during harvesting season.[1] In this example, the students learned from both the land and the community. At the same time, their work culminated in a symposium and an exhibition showcasing their contribution to the local knowledge. Such examples show how cultural and academic work could converge to utilize community-based accessible materials to produce local, useful knowledge. These curatorial practices provide space for local culture to grow and develop, assuring the continuation and importance of Palestinian culture as a source of growing knowledge and living practices.
Amidst the 500-year-old colonial project of Palestine, the local knowledge embedded in the community’s land practices is in danger of loss. Nevertheless, communities in Gaza are recreating their everyday knowledge and practices; they are finding ways to garden between their displacement tents, developing alternative medical procedures and relief tools, producing alternative energy from the sun and wind, and purifying seawater for human use. In other words, they are re-utilizing their land-based knowledge and developing new means for survival, community building, and resilience. Instead of archiving, institutions of knowledge development and dissemination, such as museums, should immediately shift their focus towards utilizing the collective efforts of everyday Palestinians in the preservation, rehabilitation, and development of their local knowledge and practices. This can only be achieved by working outside mainstream museum spaces and top-down curatorial processes, and by adopting a decolonial mindset in the development, interpretation, and dissemination of cultural knowledge. In the words of Palestinian Poet, Mahmoud Darwish:
Many questions remain, namely, what does it mean to decolonize museums in a context that is subject to ongoing active colonialism? And how could this be achieved in institutions that are deeply rooted in colonial donors’ policies and structures? Answering these questions in an effort to decolonize the museum is more urgent than ever.
[1] ART, CULTURE, AND TECHNOLOGY Program, “Sakiya Site Visit | Learning from the Land in Palestine,” MIT, accessed July 1, 2025, https://act.mit.edu/2019/06/sakiya-site-visit-learning-from-the-land-in-palestine-2/.