Unsilencing Palestine: A Photo Exhibition (Opening)

NVIC invites you to join the official opening of the exhibition on Thursday, the 23rd of November at 8:30 pm. If, after the opening, you would like to visit the exhibition on other weekdays, from the 26th to the 30th of November, please make an appointment by sending an email to our info address: info@nvic.leidenuniv.nl

During the turbulence of the period after the First World War, Dutch photographer Frank Scholten (1881-1942) travelled to Palestine with the aim of producing an ‘illustrated Bible.’ He first travelled through Italy and Greece in 1920, arriving in Palestine in 1921 where he would stay for two years. While the bulk of his photo collection consists of images of Palestine, his camera lens also gives us a wider snapshot of modernity in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Scholten gives us a rare view of a very particular world that would set in motion the events which shape the region today. Scholten’s documentary approach to photography gives us scenes of an everyday modernity in Palestine with a particular attention to ethnography. His lens shows us the complicated mosaic of communities in the Eastern Mediterranean at a moment when the impacts of the war cemented competing nationalisms.

Exhibition curated by Sary Zananiri

Sary Zananiri is an artist, cultural historian and Middle East heritage specialist. He is currently writing a monograph, Photographing Biblical Modernity: Frank Scholten in British Mandate Palestine (IB Tauris, forthcoming 2024). He has co-edited two volumes with Karène Sanchez Summerer Imaging and Imagining Palestine: Photography, Modernity and the Biblical Lens (Brill, 2021) and European Cultural Diplomacy and Arab Christians in Palestine: Between Contention and Connection (Palgrave McMillan, 2021). Recent exhibitions include the Qattan Foundation, Ramallah (2023), University of Groningen Library (2023), INALCO, Paris (June-July 2022), the Mawjoudin Queer Film Festival, Tunis (September 2022), the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (December 2021-February 2022), the National Glass Museum, Wagga Wagga (July-November 2021), Rijksmuseum Oudheden, Leiden (May-October 2020) and Der Haus Der Kunst der Welt for ALMS, Berlin (June 2019). He was a Postdoctoral Fellow on the NWO funded project CrossRoads: European Cultural Diplomacy and Arab Christians in Palestine 1918-1948 and the Netherlands Institute for the Near East at Leiden University, a visiting scholar at Dar al Kalima in Bethlehem and is an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens.