The RCA is a partner in a major four-year research programme titled 4Cs: from Conflict to Conviviality through Creativity and Culture. This included an Artist Residency co-funded by Creative Europe and the RCA, curated by Michaela Crimmin, Reader in Art and Conflict, RCA and 4Cs UK art director.

After an extensive selection process, advised by international curators, Noor Abuarafeh was invited to London. A Palestinian artist living and working in Jerusalem, Abuarafeh questions how history is constructed, visualised, perceived, and understood; how all these elements are related to fact and fiction, including imagining the past when there are gaps in documentation.

Noor Abuarafeh’s research focused on the whereabouts of works by Palestinian artists from exhibitions that took place in Europe in the last century, and particularly from an exhibition in 1919 held at the Imperial War Museums. Lost, overlooked, displaced, or hidden, these artworks and the process of finding them act as a metaphor for displaced and marginalised people - a constructive reclamation of history in part as an act of reconciliation, contextualising the present in the past.
The outcome of the residency was an art book entitled ‘Rumours Began Some Time Ago’, a response to the question ‘how can we document what is absent?’ It includes an illustrated account of British involvement during the Mandate where civil servants sought to create a museum dedicated to Palestinian art and crafts in Jerusalem. It focuses particularly on the role of the ‘Pro Jerusalem Society’, established in 1917 by Sir Ronald Storrs, the then Military Governor of Jerusalem.
An online version of the publication is available.

The Delfina Foundation hosted Noor’s residency. Hilary Roberts, Research Curator of Photography at the Imperial War Museums, and Jack Persekian, director of the Al-Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art in Jerusalem, both supported the residency.

Further informations: https://4cs-conflict-conviviality.eu