Archiving Gaza in the Present

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acti
archaeology
architecture
art
artifacts
artworks
Category=AGC
collective
community
conflict
crisis
culture
degradation
destruction
documentation
emotional
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erasure
essays
genocide
heritage
history
identity
intangible
interdisciplinary
intervention
interviews
journalism
law
legal
loss
maps
memory
narrative
photography
poems
preservation
resilience
resistance
resource
scholarship
sites
storytelling
suffering
survival
tangible
testimony
trauma
visual
voices
war

Product details

  • ISBN 9781849250979
  • Weight: 600g
  • Dimensions: 200 x 250mm
  • Publication Date: 20 Nov 2025
  • Publisher: Saqi Books
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Paperback
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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 – historic buildings, art centres, universities and museums that existed before October 2023 – 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.

Contributors include Selma Dabbagh, Salman Abu Sitta, Shareef Sarhan, Hazem Harb, Malak Mattar, Marc-André Haldimann, Nadia Yaqub, Omar Al-Qattan, Kegham Djeghalian, Caitlin Procter, Atef Alshaer, Shatha Safi, Yara Sharif and Nasser Golzar.

Dina Matar is professor of Global Communication and Arab Media at SOAS, University of London and former Chair of Centre for Palestine Studies. She is editor, with Helga Tawil-Souri, of Producing Palestine: the Creative Production of Palestine through Contemporary Media (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024), Gaza as Metaphor (Hurst, 2016), and author of What it Means to be Palestinian: Stories of Palestinian Peoplehood (I.B. Tauris, 2010). Venetia Porter is former senior curator for Islamic and Contemporary Middle East art at the British Museum where she is now honorary research fellow. Her exhibitions include Hajj: journey to the heart of Islam (2012) and she was the lead curator for the Albukhary Foundation gallery of the Islamic World (opened 2018). She is a trustee of the Arab British Centre and her most recent publication is Artists Making Books: Poetry to Politics (British Museum Press 2023).