New Art Gallery Brings Palestinian Culture to London
London will soon become home to the first Palestinian art gallery in Europe. The Palestine Gallery near Euston station will open this spring, promising to offer Londoners a taste of Palestinian culture never before seen in the UK.
“The west only hears about Palestinians through conflict and disaster. Instead of more political work, why not go for culture?” said the gallery director Yahya Zaloom.
The gallery’s first exhibition combines art with technology. BBC and ITN archives relay news about Palestine from the early twentieth century, and interactive screens show the real life stories of Palestinians from the Shatila and Al-Shati refugee camps.
The centre piece is a visual history of Palestine that spans the length of a wall and shows Palestinian life from before the Israeli occupation to the present day. Adjacent to this is a painting by Laila Shawa, a Palestinian artist born in Gaza and now living in London.
“We are going to show our humble culture with the highest technology,” said Antoine Raffoul, an architect on the gallery’s advisory committee. Mr. Raffoul is working on a project for the gallery that will reconstruct East Jerusalem’s Lifta village, which he described as “half destroyed, half deserted” in 1948.
Gavin Gross, the director of public affairs at the Zionist Federation, said the gallery is “a good idea” if it intends to educate people about the region. He added, “My issue is that many educated people in Britain don’t really know anything about ordinary Israeli and Palestinian life.”
The idea for the gallery came from the Palestine Return Centre, an independent academic and media consultancy group based in London since 1996. The Centre originally planned to create a Palestinian museum, but later decided on the gallery in order to move away from “the past” and instead “talk about the present and future,” said Mr. Zaloom.
Construction for the gallery began in 2005, and today it is 95 percent done. This comes at a time when Palestine has recently launched its first international football match in the West Bank against Jordan.
