Palestinian National Museum art show opens in Paris

PARIS:An exhibition of art donated to the as yet only notional National Museum of Palestine has gone on show in Paris.

Works by the first couple of photography, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Martine Franck, as well as the street artist Jef Aerosol are featured in “Colors of the World,” which runs at the Arab World Institute (IMA) in the French capital until December 20.

Art given to the exiled museum has been held in the IMA’s reserves in France since 2015.

IMA chief and former French culture minister Jack Lang told AFP that so far the institute has been looking after some 400 works.

“It is a Palestinian museum in exile made up of donations from artists from a number of countries which we keep in our reserves,” Lang added.

He said he hoped a bricks and mortar Palestine museum “will be built one day in East Jerusalem.”

Palestine’s ambassador to UNESCO, Elias Sanbar, said the project “may seem utopian,” but similar museums in exile were set up for South Africa under apartheid and Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship.

Alongside the show, the IMA is also staging an exhibition of photos and videos by Arab artists called “Shared Memories” drawn from the vast donation of Lebanese collector Claude Lemand.