Archiving Gaza in the Present

Conflict does more than destroy physical spaces. It extinguishes lives, erases histories and disrupts the collective memory of entire communities.

In Gaza, where genocide has wrought catastrophic loss, the destruction of heritage adds another dimension of devastation. Yet amid the rubble, acts of archiving, art-making and storytelling persist.

Archiving Gaza in the Present brings together voices from Palestine and beyond to document the cultural erasure and to explore how creative and archival practices resist it. Contributions from curators, architects, artists, journalists, lawyers and scholars capture Gaza’s once-vibrant cultural life, now turned to rubble.

Featuring rich visual material – from fragmented WhatsApp testimonies to forensic documentation – and including artworks, maps and photographs, Archiving Gaza in the Present is both a living archive and a call to action. It is a vital resource for understanding Gaza’s cultural survival amid destruction.

In partnership with the Arab British Centre.

About the Author

Venetia Porter is an Honorary Research Fellow at The Courtauld Institute of Art and at The British Museum. She was formerly Senior Curator for Islamic and Contemporary Middle East art at The British Museum and the lead curator for the Albukhary Foundation Gallery of the Islamic World, which opened 2018.

Dina Matar is Professor of Political Communication and Arab Media at the Centre for Global Media and Communication at SOAS, University of London. She is the chair of the Centre for Palestine Studies at SOAS, and the founding editor of the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication.