Overview
As their contribution to SB12, Kristine Khouri and Rasha Salti have organised a full day of talks and screenings for March Meeting 2015 to explore a number of questions raised by their research on The International Art Exhibition for Palestine. Speakers include WJT Mitchell, Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago and editor of Critical Inquiry; Mari Oka, scholar of Modern Arabic Literature and professor at the Graduate School of Human and Integrated Studies, Kyoto University and May Shigenobu, writer and journalist.
The International Art Exhibition for Palestine opened at Beirut Arab University on 21 March 1978. Organised by the Plastic Arts Section of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), it included approximately two hundred donated works by artists hailing from nearly thirty countries. The show was intended as the seed collection for a museum in exile, taking the form of an itinerant exhibition meant to tour the world until it could be repatriated to Palestine. Japan was among the countries with the highest number of participating artists, and in July of the same year, part of the collection travelled to Tokyo. Hosted by the Japan Afro-Asian Latin American Artists Association (JAALA), the exhibition attested to the vitality of the network of Japanese solidarity with Palestine.