The conference, organized with the cooperation of the AECID and Spain’s General Consulate in Jerusalem, will be presented by Nuria Medina, Casa Árabe’s Culture Coordinator.
 
In March 2018, The Palestinian Museum opened its doors for the first time, an initiative which the Palestinian development NGO, the Taawon-Welfare Association, committed to providing humanitarian aid to the Palestinian population for decades, had been planning for nearly twenty years.

This museum is located in a modern building designed by the Heneghan Peng Studio near Bir Zeit University in the vicinity of Ramallah. Its program includes the original idea, which uses the Palestinian art community as a point of reference, also involving well-known personages of international renown from the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem, as well as the immense Palestinian diaspora. Due to all of this, the Palestinian Museum has now become one of the role models among institutions in the fields of art and contemporary culture in the Middle East, working in collaboration with many different museums and international institutions.

Adila Laïdi-Hanieh has been the director of the Palestinian Museum since 2018. She is a writer and scholar with a fine career behind her in the field of management of the arts and cultural practices, above all those from Palestine, as well as being highly knowledgable about Arab intellectual history. In 1996, she founded the mythical Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah, where well-known Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish had his office, at an institution which has continued to put on an intensive, high-quality schedule of cultural activities, despite all of the ups and downs it has endured in the past and those in the everyday life of the city where it is located in the West Bank.  She will be speaking to us about the new Palestinian Museum and the major outreach being achieved by today’s Palestinian creators of art.