Archaeological Site, after restoration.
WHAT MENTORSHIP LOOKS LIKE
The Summer Academy( 1998) and The Lab( 2011) represent Darat al Funun’ s most sustained investment in young Arab artists. The Foundation is deliberate about the language it uses: the Summer Academy is mentorship, not education. The distinction matters. Education implies transmitting a curriculum; mentorship is something more relational— a form of accompaniment that meets each artist where they are and supports them in developing their own way of thinking and making. The Lab, meanwhile, offers the scarcest resource available to young artists in the region: time and space to experiment without the pressure of output— a place to test ideas, to understand what one is working toward, before committing to a finished form. What the region needs from its cultural institutions, they reflect, is more of exactly this— not only programs and exhibitions, but the underlying conditions that make practice possible.
WHEN NEUTRALITY IS NOT AN OPTION
In October 2023, Darat al Funun responded to the assault on Gaza by suspending its entire program. It presented In Solidarity with Palestine, followed by Suha Shoman’ s We Won’ t Leave— a text-based archival installation documenting the moment in real time through quotations of genocidal rhetoric, lists of destroyed sites including churches, mosques, and art spaces, and the growing names of silenced cultural workers, all situated within the longer history of the Nakba. At its core, it was a call for institutions to speak with one voice.
Since then, programming has continued to respond: Under Fire( drawings and journals by four Gazan artists made during the siege); Resurgent Nahda, curated by Nadi Abusaada, revisiting Arab exhibitions held in Mandate Jerusalem in 1933 and 1934; Until This Elegy Ends by Joe Namy on the destruction of southern Lebanon; and Dear Viewers by Raeda Saadeh on what it means to watch and endure. The current exhibition, In That Same Hour, brings together nineteen artists and collectives from Lebanon, Spain, South Africa, Canada, and beyond— each grappling with what this hour has asked of artistic practice.
“ Palestine is the wound that never subsides,” Hamdan says plainly.“ It has always been central to who we are. When the very fabric of existence is under attack, continuity in our relationships with one another becomes a form of cultural resistance.”
26 MATAHEF ISSUE 03