Canadian Museum for Human Rights show on Palestinian displacement offers nuanced, empathetic perspective amid uproar – The Art Newspaper

The long-awaited exhibition Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) in Winnipeg opens to the public tomorrow (27 June) in spite of unprecedented opposition from certain members of Canada’s Jewish community—who deemed it “one-sided” when nearly no information about its contents was publicly available—legal threats from an Israeli organisation and the resignation of the museum’s only Jewish board member. Despite this opposition, the exhibition manages to transcend familiar tropes by focusing not only on the Nakba—the Arabic word for “catastrophe” used by Palestinians to describe the killing, dispossession and displacement in the region after Israel was founded in 1948—but also on the beauty and resilience of Palestinian culture.

“What I say to the critics is ‘come and see it first’,” Isabelle Masson, the exhibition’s curator, tells The Art Newspaper.

Palestine Uprooted spans three displays occupying two walls on the museum’s fifth floor. Visitors are greeted by three panels featuring the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish. Featuring text in English, French and Arabic, the panels double as screens for projections tying his poetry to lived Palestinian experience, images of women and children as well as protests against the bombing of Gaza. One passage reads: “As you think of others far away, think of yourself / (say: ‘If only I were a candle in the dark’).” Flyers with the poems in translation and the original Arabic are available for visitors to take home and share.

Members of the Palestinian Canadian community first approached the CMHR about organising an exhibition when the institution opened in 2014, but it wasn’t until 2021 that curatorial efforts began in earnest, Masson tells The Art Newspaper. It was then that she began to meet with and interview members of Winnipeg and Montreal’s well-established Palestinian communities. “Their stories were moving,” she says.

On one occasion, a Palestinian woman from the Al Taji family showed Masson a paper wrapper for citrus fruits from her family’s once-thriving orchard in the village of Wadi Hunayn (now in the Israeli city of Ramle), an item her grandmother had kept for years as both a symbol of loss and pride. Around a curved wall featuring a print of Gazan tatreez (traditional embroidery that comprises emblems of clans, villages and other identifying patterns), the citrus wrapper is now part of a display of memory boxes that fuse the digital with the tactile, the past with the present.

The display cases also include a Gazan thobe—the traditional embroidered Palestinian dress that, like tatreez, weaves narratives of identity and belonging into its very threads—on loan from a Palestinian woman in Winnipeg, as well as keys to her grandparents’ house that visitors are encouraged to touch. Adjacent monitors play video interviews of Palestinian Canadians talking about loss of and love for their homeland.

The exhibition features some contemporary imagery and Palestinian art, including a print of Malak Mattar’s 2020 work Bound Together in Gaza. The exhibition’s introductory panel juxtaposes a large-format photograph of Gazans fleeing Khan Yunis in 2024 with imagery and didactics explaining the historical and ongoing Nakba. Rajie Cook’s 2002 sculpture Curfews and Closures, on loan from the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, comprises a keffiyeh contained in a bird cage perched on top of two chipped legs of a figurine, providing a compelling visual metaphor for the stories told by the Palestinian Canadians in the nearby videos.

Masson’s curatorial goal for Palestine Uprooted was to “foreground and centre Palestinian voices that are often marginalised”, she says. “We came into this project quite aware that Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism influences who is heard and whose suffering is seen as important. We wanted to humanise Palestinians not just by focussing on their trauma but on the richness of their culture.”

Some Palestinian Canadians flew in from across the country to take in a special preview of the exhibition, which was often a very emotional experience. Ramsey Zeid, part of the Palestinian community advisory network the museum consulted, brought his parents, who were Nakba survivors.

“Seeing the exhibition brought tears to my parents’ eyes,” Zeid says. Not only because it revived their trauma but also because “for the first time, in an internationally recognised museum, our stories—which have been silenced for so long—were told and seen and heard and validated”.

He adds that the exhibition demonstrates that “no matter what we go through, our culture lives on—passed from generation to generation. That’s how we keep the Palestinian spirit alive.”

• Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present, 27 June 2026-30 November 2028, Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Winnipeg