Nadi Abusaada —

“Until a few weeks ago, I thought this painting was lost,” Sliman Mansour, the renowned Palestinian artist, now seventy-seven, tells me during our sitting at the Palestinian Museum, nestled in the terraced hills of Birzeit.

The painting in question, completed in 1978, depicts a man confronting a dragon-led army of invaders. Drawing on the legend of St. George—a figure frequently summoned across Byzantine iconography—Mansour subtly integrates this imagery, which was historically adopted and adapted by Palestinians.¹ The legend takes on a uniquely Palestinian dimension through the figure of Al Khadr, the Arab manifestation of St. George. Christian and Muslim shrines alike across Palestine are dedicated to this saint and stand as testaments to his enduring cultural presence. Revered for his healing and protective powers, Al Khadr offers the namesake for Palestinian churches and mosques, while statues, mosaics, and icons of Al Khadr are carved into the very walls and entryways of homes and places of gathering. In Palestine, Al Khadr persists not only as a religious figure but also as a local martyr and folk hero.

In Mansour’s painting, Al Khadr becomes more than an icon of the past; he is an embodiment of the contemporary Palestinian, who remains deeply rooted in the land, standing tall against invaders from distant shores. The composition is divided into two parts. On the left, there is a dragon, figured like the Trojan Horse, from within which an army of faceless invaders marches forth. Tanks, rockets, and other modern munitions blend with medieval carriages, an anachronism that hints at a paradox central to Zionism—its advanced weaponry concealing an outdated, colonial ideology. The facelessness of the soldiers, much like in Goya’s The Third of May 1808, strips them of their identity, reducing them to mere conduits of the Zionist agenda.

On the right, Al Khadr grips an axe, seemingly prepared for battle. And yet the backdrop suggests a different narrative. While the dragon on the left draws us toward the anticipation of war, the scene behind Al Khadr shifts our focus. Mansour tells me that he had originally titled the painting Resisting Israeli Settlements, though no such colonial settlements are visible in the background. Instead, we see a vibrant Palestinian landscape, unscarred by the ravages of occupation—homes, orchards, workers, mothers, students, and craftsmen. This is not a Palestine under siege but one thriving and self-sufficient—its own world, in its own right.

At a time when Palestine had already been under Zionist colonial rule for decades, Mansour’s vision is a reflection not just of reality but also of aspiration. He paints Palestine not as it was but as it could be—a decolonized, enduring homeland where quotidian life persists undisturbed. Through this, Mansour elevates the image of resistance from a mere battle against oppression to a reclamation of a future, asserting that the fight is not just for survival but also for the preservation of an entire way of life.

The painting's reappearance is as storied as its subject matter. In July 2024, it resurfaced at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. Far from being a recent acquisition, the painting—along with dozens of other works by Palestinian and Arab artists once believed lost—had been housed in the Iranian capital since the early 1980s.² Resisting Israeli Settlements had only ever been fleetingly exhibited prior to its disappearance, with a photograph from Lebanon’s Assafir newspaper confirming its short-lived debut at the May 15, 1979, exhibition Day of the Palestinian Struggle. Hosted in the courtyard of Beirut Arab University and organized amid the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990), this exhibition was a staging of protest art gathered from across the region. Although originally intended to be loaned to Iran on a temporary basis, the painting became entangled in the political turmoil that engulfed the Palestinian struggle and the region during this period, leading to its extended absence.

This story is emblematic of the broader history of Palestinians and their material culture—a history marked by lost, disappeared, and looted objects, and disrupted and unfulfilled aspirations. During the 1948 Nakba, as Zionist militias ethnically cleansed and forced into exile nearly a million Palestinians from their native lands, countless Palestinian homes and public buildings were seized and their contents pillaged. “Farewell, my library! Farewell, my books,” lamented the Jerusalemite intellectual Khalil Sakakini after his forced expulsion in 1948. “I don’t know what became of you… Were you looted? Burned?… Taken to a public or private library? Or did you end up on grocery store shelves?”³ Some volumes from Sakakini’s collection are among the tens of thousands of Palestinian books looted by Israel since 1948 and now held in the National Library of Israel (NLI), labeled “AP” for Abandoned Property.

Palestinian artists and their works shared a similar fate of disappearance and looting. To this day, much remains unknown about the Palestinian art scene before the Nakba. In my research on the 1933 and 1934 Arab exhibitions in Jerusalem, which included the work of pioneering Palestinian and Arab artists, I have encountered countless stories of artworks smuggled out of Palestine during the Nakba—some by artists who have since been completely forgotten, their works lost or obscured, others looted and later resurfaced only to be sold at auction.⁴ While a few pre-1948 works by Palestinian artists such as Khalil Halaby, Nicola Saig, Tawfiq Jawhariyyeh, Zulfa al-Saadi, and Sophie Halaby have survived, little is known about many other artists whose works were not similarly preserved or have yet to be rediscovered.⁵

The rupture of Palestinian life after 1948, the very life Mansour sought to capture in his painting, was also deeply mirrored in the cultural landscape. While some creative threads were maintained, particularly through artists like Ismail Shammout and Kamal Boullata, both of whom were trained by pioneer artists prior to the Nakba, the conditions for Palestinian art fundamentally shifted again after the 1960s with the Six-Day War and resultant Naksa.⁶ Exile became a defining factor in artistic production, especially after the Palestinian Liberation Organization‘s (PLO) relocation to Lebanon during that period, which itself also introduced new influences, challenges, and experimentations in artistic mediums. This shift, marked by displacement and refugeehood, transformed the trajectory of Palestinian art, and forced artists to navigate questions of identity, memory, and belonging.

The experience of exile not only disrupted the continuity of existing artistic traditions but also compelled artists to engage with new forms of expression shaped by the realities of life in the diaspora and the ongoing struggle for Palestinian liberation. Mustafa al-Hallaj, a prominent exiled Palestinian artist of the twentieth century, epitomized this shift. After completing his studies in Egypt, he famously discarded all his sculptures into the Nile and transitioned away from sculpture-making, embracing mediums that better resonated with his exilic condition. Reflecting on this change, he remarked, “It was my wanderings that led me to [woodblock] carving. Sculpture requires institutions, stability, and land, and I have none… Sculpture is not suitable for the displaced artist, I think.”⁷ At this stage, al-Hallaj decided to leave Egypt and join the Palestinian art movement under the auspices of the PLO, relocating first to Damascus and later to Beirut in the 1970s.

These cycles of disruption and resurgence have shaped Palestinian cultural production throughout this era and continue to define it today. In 1978 and 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon—four decades before its current attacks on the country and genocidal war in Gaza—further intensifying the fragmentation of Palestinian existence. The war’s destructive impact continues to loom large in Palestinian and Lebanese memory. It left behind not only a legacy of devastation but also one of dispersion—of people, memories, and objects. One historian even speaks of a shortage of suitcases after the war, as belongings had to be hastily packed, hidden, and smuggled out.⁸ These displaced objects ranged from personal mementos to the papers and archives of an entire liberation movement. In February 1983, Israel bombed the Palestine Research Center in Beirut, which housed the archives of the PLO, looting part of the archive before eventually returning it as part of a prisoner exchange deal.⁹

Palestinian art, like the broader Palestinian archive and its people, also fell victim to this moment. Alongside books and documents, an important collection of artworks belonging to the PLO was housed in Beirut. More than just a collection, these artworks also held the story of how they got there in the first place. Much of this history remained buried until curators Rasha Salti and Kristine Khouri stumbled upon a forgotten 1978 exhibition catalog while conducting research in an artist’s library in Beirut. The catalog, titled 1978 Art Exhibition in Solidarity with Palestine, ignited their decade-long journey to uncover the forgotten history behind it. The list of contributors featured some of the most renowned Palestinian, Arab, and international artists working at the time, including the Moroccan artists Mohammad Melehi and Mohammad Chabaa, whose works were featured on the exhibition’s poster and invitation. Like Mansour’s painting, Chabaa's original work, donated to the 1978 exhibition with the vision of contributing to a future Palestinian museum, was presumed lost—that is, until it also recently resurfaced in a Tehran museum.

I met Rasha Salti in Paris this past April, where she and Kristine Khouri presented the latest edition of their exhibition Past Disquiet at the Palais de Tokyo, recounting the story of the 1978 Art Exhibition in Solidarity with Palestine.¹⁰ Rather than display original artworks, most of which remain missing, the exhibition reconstructed the world surrounding the art and its makers through a concerted reproduction of the fragmented archives and memories that survive today. Although their research began with the exhibition of 1978, Salti explained that it soon grew to encompass the broader genres of solidarity exhibitions and museums in exile developed during that period. Our tour of the Paris show began in Chile, where this genre first took root in the early 1970s, and continued through to apartheid South Africa and to Nicaragua, tracing a transcontinental history of traveling exhibitions that gave voice to a generation of artists supporting liberation movements the world over.

One cannot help but read this exhibition as not only a summoning of the past but also a call to action in the present, when reigniting and re-tethering these solidarities proves most urgent. In this exhibition on exhibitions—a retrospective designed to revive these connections—we are invited to reflect on how such interventions in the past provide valuable insights and strategies for contemporary resistance efforts, both within and beyond the art world.

Our journey through the exhibition concluded where the story itself began: Palestine. This section showcased materials that not only detailed the outcomes of the 1978 Artists' Solidarity with Palestine exhibition held at Beirut Arab University but also highlighted the Palestinian, Arab, and international networks and allyships that first made such an exhibition possible. Featured were the establishment of the PLO’s Plastic Arts Section under Mona Saudi (also the organizer of the 1978 exhibition), the pioneering work of the Palestine Film Unit led by Hani Jawhariyyeh, and the children’s books published by Dar al-Fata al-Arabi.

Beirut, during its so-called “long sixties,” which lasted until the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975, provided fertile ground for these kinds of institutional experiments. In this period, Beirut, while also enjoying a so-called “golden age” of upper-middle-class indulgence, emerged as a transnational hub of politically engaged artistic and intellectual production.¹¹ The city became a crucible for anti-imperialist movements and the Palestinian revolution, embodying what art historian Zeina Maasri calls “cosmopolitan radicalism”—a charged space where radical political and artistic ideas flourished.¹² Palestinian artists were a leading force in Beirut's radical art scene. Yet, rather than drawing inspiration from the city where they were based, their works remained deeply rooted in the memory and imagery of their homeland, Palestine, from which they were exiled.

The Paris exhibition also highlighted the collective organization of Palestinian artists through a display of reproduced documents, correspondences, photographs, and event pamphlets—particularly foregrounding the founding of the General Union of Palestinian Artists, led by Ismail Shammout in 1969. This mobilization of creative thought and output paralleled similar developments across the Arab world, where artists from Morocco, Iraq, and Syria were defining their countries’ postcolonial identities through committed artistic production. In contrast, the Palestinian struggle for liberation remained a regional exception—an ongoing anti-colonial movement in an era when much of the region was already immersed in postcolonial nation-building.

The internationalist dimension taken on by the Palestinian liberation struggle and its artistic landscape by the late 1970s was made especially legible by the exhibition. It highlighted how other anti-colonial and anti-fascist struggles, particularly those that developed across South America and Africa, served as points of contact for cross-histories of resistance. This was also true of the solidarity within European metropoles, such as Paris, which played a key role in the formation of the 1978 exhibition. There, Salti and Khouri met Claude Lazar, an artist and close friend of Ezzedine Kalak, the PLO representative to France, who was assassinated in 1978. “I have been waiting for you for thirty years,” Lazar told them at their first meeting, Salti recalled. His photographs and memories of the 1978 exhibition were an invaluable resource for uncovering the hidden narratives that Past Disquiet sought to tell.

The depth of Salti and Khouri’s research was further reflected in the exhibition’s four video installations, each narrating the story of a different exhibition in solidarity—in Chile, South Africa, Nicaragua, and Palestine. In these videos, the archive appeared not as a centralized institution but as a mosaic of personal memories and lived experiences—sometimes contradictory, sometimes contentious. In the installation dedicated to the exhibition on Palestine, the curators spoke with various individuals who had either attended or participated in the 1978 event in Beirut, including Mansour. For some, the exhibition was a faded memory, while, for others, it remained vivid. Some had much to share, while others were reluctant to speak on camera. This nuanced exploration of memory and loss underscored the fragility of the archive and the vital importance of reconstructing these neglected histories.

Indeed, Salti and Khouri’s exhibition reaffirms that a central challenge in Palestinian history is the ongoing struggle to reconstruct and reclaim the past. After all, these are exhibitions that, in the context of loss—despite the loss—have been able to form links with that past. It is not only a matter of recognizing loss but of actively anticipating, confronting, and transcending it, of crafting a narrative that reaches beyond its confines and suggests a futurity on Palestinian terms. These questions of agency and perspective are engendered in Mansour’s painting, particularly in his portrayal of the Palestinian landscape without Zionist settlements, wherein he takes up the challenge of not merely resisting the colonial frame, but imagining Palestinian life without it.

In a similar vein, the disappearance and reappearance of Mansour’s painting, like many Palestinian artworks since the Nakba, remind us that the history of Palestinian art demands a double reading—one that considers both the artwork’s subject and its many journeys. In his “Travelling Theory,” Edward W. Said explains how ideas evolve and adapt as they move across different contexts and disciplines, showing us how meaning can shift depending on where and how it is received.¹³ To truly understand an idea, one must grasp its movement and reinterpretation. This resonates deeply in the world of Palestinian art, where not only ideas but also historical objects and artworks travel. As these works move, their stories and significance transform, reflecting a broader narrative of displacement and adaptation, where both artists and their creations become part of a dynamic historical and cultural exchange.

When we speak of the many worlds of Palestinian art, we therefore refer not only to the worlds of influence, conditions of creation, and the journeys these works undertake, but also to the histories of the continued struggles they embody and drive. These works speak to the failures of looting and attempted erasure to sever our history from our collective memory. It is these enduring commitments and the international solidarities that sustain them that shape both the unique and shared narratives of Palestinian art, reminding us that these stories are not just about the past—they are part of an ongoing, dynamic process of resistance against all odds, and against all monsters.