This essay sheds light on the biennales in Palestine that have a responsive/radical perception of space (where things happen) and time (when things happen and for how long), and against the practices of artistic production and biennales that lend themselves to already formulated agendas. I critically engage with the Riwaq Biennale (RB) and Qalandiya International (Qi) to further speculate on the role of biennales and art in changing not only the content and form, but also the management modalities and the managerial structures of events in the public sphere.

This essay sheds light on “all that did not remain” of the physical structures of regional government headquarters from the mid- and the late Ottoman era in Palestine, including the destroyed saraya of Bethlehem, Jaffa, and Haifa. The essay poses a methodological question about studying architecture that is missing from the landscape and talking about events that are missing from historical records, and suggests that indirect entry points, such as early photography, can be of great help. 

This essay addresses the need to look into ‘postcolonial’/‘post-Oslo’ Palestine heritage discourses and practices to uncover commonalities and divergences. These practices and discourses, I claim, tell a story about hidden codes of subjectivity while revealing the setbacks of postcolonial heritage discourses in a ‘postcolonial era’.

Beyond the commonsense dichotomy between art as radical practice and heritage as conservation, this article analyzes Palestinian heritage as the ambiguous terrain where these two practices meet, creating a language that is both locally rooted and cosmopolitan. By examining the recent Palestinian art biennales (biennials), I show how heritage-informed art functions as a platform for performing the future Palestinian nation-state.

The town of Birzeit is located 10 km north of Ramallah. It hosts the oldest university in Palestine (Birzeit University), as well as a vast amount of Heritage sites and features. The town's multicultural environment along with its intrinsic qualities makes it a suitable site for a pilot project that aims at using rehabilitation as a tool for development.

Cultural heritage in Palestine was, and still is, a very sensitive, ideologically and politically tainted issue. This is because heritage research in Palestine has been intricately tied to the region’s historical development since 1850. Thus, it is essential to review this context in order to properly assess the current status and its perspectives for the future.