The exhibition “We Are Telling All of You, but We Are Not Telling Anyone Else” presents a body of work by Noor Abuarafeh, comprising video, video installations and prints. The works explore the notion of refusal in relation to our present perspective on  history, seeking alternative ways of remembering and constructing historical narratives beyond  the institutional frameworks of archives and museums.

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Drawing on a long history of promises to establish museums in Palestine, Abuarafeh questions the museum as a form and its relevance within a context in which the past remains insistently present, asking what may be considered history within a colonised context.

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The narratives within the different works in the exhibition unfold through conversations with people who have formed distinctive relationships with archives, museums, and artworks; relationships rooted not in materiality but in liberating these objects from their physical form. These include preserving the  memory of a missing exhibition from 2005, considering it  a message that its return was never expected; reflecting on black-and-white photographs whose owner refuses nostalgia for the  period they depict, looking at objects never intended for museum display; or protecting artworks and archives from ending up in colonial institutions by burning or burying them underground.

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Each of these gestures redefines the relationship between objects and history, liberating  them from their physicality and turning these practices into acts of emancipation.  

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“We Are Telling All of You, but We Are Not Telling Anyone Else” —Fred Moten and Stefano Harney (2010, p. 5)

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→ Noor Abuarafeh

→ Haytham el Wardany