Archiving Gaza in the Present - by Dina Matar & Venetia Porter (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Conflict does more than destroy physical spaces. It extinguishes lives, erases histories and disrupts the collective memory of entire communities. In Gaza, where genocide has wrought catastrophic loss, the destruction of heritage adds another dimension of devastation. Yet amid the rubble, acts of archiving, art-making and storytelling persist.

Archiving Gaza in the Present brings together voices from Palestine and beyond to document the cultural erasure and to explore how creative and archival practices resist it. Contributions from curators, architects, artists, journalists, lawyers and scholars capture Gaza's once-vibrant cultural life - historic buildings, art centres, universities and museums that existed before October 2023 - now turned to rubble.

Featuring rich visual material - from fragmented WhatsApp testimonies to forensic documentation - and including artworks, maps and photographs, Archiving Gaza in the Present is both a living archive and a call to action. It is a vital resource for understanding Gaza's cultural survival amid destruction.

In partnership with the Arab British Centre.

About the Author

Dina Matar is Professor of Political Communication and Arab Media at the Centre for Global Media and Communication at SOAS, University of London. She is the chair of the Centre for Palestine Studies at SOAS, and the founding editor of the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication. Matar is the author of What it means to be Palestinian: Stories of Palestinian Peoplehood and the co-editor of Narrating Conflict in the Middle East: Discourse, Image and Communications Practices in Lebanon and Palestine (with Zahera Harb).

Venetia Porter is an Honorary Research Fellow at The Courtauld Institute of Art and at The British Museum. She was formerly Senior Curator for Islamic and Contemporary Middle East art at The British Museum and the lead curator for the Albukhary Foundation Gallery of the Islamic World, which opened 2018. Her publications include Artists Making Books: Poetry to Politics, Reflections, Contemporary Art of the Middle East and North Africa (with Natasha Morris and Charles Tripp), Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam (ed.) and Word into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East.