The Avery Review, (April 2025).
In July 1933, a large crowd from all over Palestine and even some neighboring Arab cities, gathered in Jerusalem in front of the Palace Hotel to attend the First Arab Exhibition. The exhibition—along with its second installment in 1934—sought to showcase and promote the latest Arab innovations, industries, products, crafts, and arts. Walking through the hallways of the Palace Hotel and into its rooms—which were repurposed as exhibition spaces—one would have found chocolate from Beirut, cigarettes from Haifa or Latakia, fragrances from Tripoli, soap from Nablus, blankets from Baghdad, leather works from Aleppo, carpets from Cairo, silk and cotton fabrics and garments from Damascus, Tatreez embroidery, and mother of pearl pieces from Bethlehem, as well as many other products from the Arab world, like oil paintings, metal works, furniture, and medicine. If visitors got tired walking around the exhibition halls, they could rest in the building’s garden cafe or attend a cinema screening or music performance in its theater on the upper floor. The Palace Hotel was not only the site where the exhibitions took place; it was itself on display in a way. Built in 1929 by the Supreme Muslim Council, it was a sign of Palestine’s modernity, and itself was one of the local innovations the Arab Exhibitions sought to celebrate.
In June 2024, a crowd gathered in Amman at Darat al Funun to attend Resurgent Nahda: The Arab Exhibitions in Mandate Jerusalem—an exhibition curated by architectural scholar Nadi Abusaada that sought to shed light on the history of the First and Second Arab Exhibitions that took place in Jerusalem in 1933 and 1934.
One could choose to view Resurgent Nahda as an exhibition documenting a specific moment or event in the history of Mandate Palestine. But doing so, I believe, overlooks a crucial aspect of the exhibition. Instead, I propose engaging with Resurgent Nahda as a meta-exhibition—an exhibition about exhibition-making practices—one that both explores and propels exhibitions as sites of imagination. I argue that Resurgent Nahda illustrates how the domain of exhibition-making became a battleground for contradictory colonial and Arab national social imaginaries in Mandate Palestine, at the same time that it mobilizes the audience’s imagination in countering colonial erasure through curatorial experiments in speculative and potential history.