An Exhibit Explores The Materiality of Protest

view of the exhibition space with postcards lining the far wall.

Awarded a semester-long artist residency by NYU's Asian/Pacific/American Institute, Palestinian artist, researcher, and Media, Culture, and Communication PhD student Nadine Fattaleh is compiling a living archive of her community’s collective struggle for political justice. Fattaleh, who refers to herself as “a collector and producer of texts and images,” demonstrates the power of her curatorial instincts with a new show, Materials of Solidarity, on view at A/P/A through December 6.

With a focus on print ephemera — protest posters, zines, street photography and Palestinian artwork such as Khaled Hourani's silkscreen series The Story of a Watermelon (2007-) or Mona Saudi's watercolor Homage to Mahmoud Darwish (1979) — the exhibition offers, as Fattaleh argues, "a palimpsest of our community and its protest of the ongoing, mediatized genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza." At the exhibit's opening night, Fattaleh asked attendees to "hear the voices that are animating these images," culled from a global movement resisting occupation, eluding censorship, and dreaming of a more democratic future.

Nine images of a watermelon shown in a grid formation on a gallery wall — Khaled Hourani's silkscreen series *The Story of a Watermelon (2007-)*

The show also documents the student and faculty protests that occurred on campus beginning last year, from renderings of the encampment to a banner listing the NYU Palestine Solidarity Coalition's demands to the NYU administration to "disclose and divest, shut down NYU Tel-Aviv, ensure Cops off Campus, and protect pro-Palestinian speech and students." Writing in Hyperallergic, NYU faculty member David Markus states that the exhibit "provides an on-campus refuge in which to reflect on the injustices of the past year and plan for the future."

a black and while abstract illustration of faces — Mona Saudi's *Homage to Mahmoud Darwish (1979)*

Many of the collection's images are reproduced as postcards that span a single wall of the exhibition space. In an artist statement, Fattaleh concedes that "images alone are not enough: they need actions to realize their political potential." She instructs gallery viewers to take from among the 90 stacks of postcards so that these materials of solidarity leave the gallery and "proliferate into the world." Through their dispersion, Fattaleh says she hopes that the "images and words multiply, distributing the collective energy of protest against genocide and reverberating the refusal of our collective complicity."

Nadine Fattaleh is a Palestinian researcher, writer, and translator from Amman. She is currently a PhD student in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Her translation of Khadijeh Habashneh’s Knights of Cinema: The Story of the Palestine Film Unit was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2023. She has worked on film and public programs at Anthology Film Archives, Upstate Films, Maysles Documentary Center, Palestine Cuts, MMAG Foundation, and Mosaic Rooms.

A line of NYPD officers outside an NYU building during campus protests in May 2024. — Officers from the New York police department in front of an NYU building last spring.

Nadine contributes to a number of volunteer initiatives including the Palestine Film Index, an open access compilation of Palestinian cinema resources, and the Palestinian Social Fund, a grassroots, solidarity-based fund supporting agricultural cooperatives in the Occupied West Bank. Her writings have appeared in Hammer and Hope, World Records Journal, Seen Journal, Broudou Magazine, Science for the People Magazine, Jadaliyya, and n+1. She is the Fall 2024 Student Artist-in-Residence at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.

Materials of Solidarity continues at the Asian/Pacific/American institute (20 Cooper Square 3rd floor gallery) through December 6.

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