Archiving Gaza in the Present: Memory, Culture and Erasure
Join us for an evening celebrating the publication of ‘Archiving Gaza in the Present’, edited by Dina Matar and Venetia Porter. The event will feature a discussion with the editors and contributors Selma Dabbagh, Emily Tripp, Atef Alshaer, Yara Sharif and Nasser Golzari, moderated by Malu Halasa.
‘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.
With thanks to the Arab British Centre and the Centre for Palestine Studies SOAS.
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MODERATOR
Malu Halasa is a writer and editor in London. Her books include Sumūd: A New Palestinian Reader (2025) and Woman Life Freedom: Voices and Art from the Iranian Women’s Protests (2023). She is presently working on Time Travels in Orientalism, from the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the odalique hammam paintings of Ingres to the harem stories of Lesley Blanch and The Fold by the contemporary Iranian artist Hoda Afshar.
SPEAKERS
Dina Matar is Professor of Political Communication 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).
Atef Alshaer is an associate professor in Arabic language and culture at the University of Westminster. His publications include Poetry and Politics in the Modern Arab World (2016), A Map of Absence: An Anthology of Palestinian Writing on Gaza (2019), and Love and Poetry in the Middle East: Literature from Antiquity to the Present (2022), and Out of Gaza (2024), which won the Palestine Book Award.
Selma Dabbagh is a British-Palestinian writer and lawyer. Selma holds an LLM from SOAS and a PhD from Goldsmiths’ University of London. She has worked for human rights organisations in Jerusalem, Cairo and London. Selma’s debut novel Out of It (Bloomsbury, 2011) is set between Gaza, London and the Gulf. She is the editor of We Wrote in Symbols: Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers (Saqi Books, 2021).
Emily Tripp is executive director of Airwars, a civilian harm monitor and watchdog organisation. In 2021 she joined Airwars managing the Casualty Recording team, and took over the leadership of the organisation in June 2022. Her previous experience includes working in humanitarian aid delivery in the Middle East, with a focus on carrying out research and managing assessment teams in Syria and Libya to help inform humanitarian responses. She holds an MA in Post Conflict Reconstruction and Development from the University of York.
Yara Sharif is a practising architect and academic. Her research is focused on design as a means to rethink contested landscapes with a new take on architectural practice. Her work sheds a light on ‘forgotten’ communities, while also interrogating the relationship between politics and architecture. Yara’s work has been published widely. Her research by design work has won a number of awards including RIBA President’s Medal for Research 2013 and 2016, as well as the Holcim Award for Sustainable Construction.
Nasser Golzari is an architect and academic committed to social architecture and creating inclusive cities that advance socio-environmental ecologies within post-colonial contexts. As the founder of GOLZARI (NG) Architects in London and co-founder of the Palestine Regeneration Team(PART). His work seeks to reclaim and celebrate socially driven architecture, particularly focusing on ‘the invisible other’. He co-founded Yara Sharif Architects for Gaza with a group of architects, educators, planners, environmentalists and designers, as a response to the current spaciocide being enacted in Gaza, with aims to provide hope to heal the fractured landscape.