Paper short abstract:

Beyond the common sense dichotomy between art as radical practice and heritage as conservation and hegemony, this paper analyzes contemporary Palestinian heritage as the ambivalent terrain where these two practices meet, creating a language that is both locally rooted and transnational.

Paper long abstract:

Beyond the common sense dichotomy between art as radical practice and heritage as conservation and hegemony, this paper analyzes contemporary Palestinian heritage as the ambivalent terrain where these two practices meet, creating a language that is both locally rooted and transnational. By examining the recent Palestinian art biennale, which placed a strong emphasis on the country's vernacular past, i.e., the traditional Arab Palestinian house, I show how art in this context functions as the platform for different kinds of national commemorations and the tool for the preservation of tradition, while heritage provides a site of creative cultural production. The biennale also undermines a traditional dichotomy between heritage and counter-memory for, as I argue, it represents both an act of anti-colonial cultural resistance and part of a state-building project. Eventually, my ethnographic material will point out to the ways in which the global heritage discourse—in spite of its Eurocentrism—can be appropriated and manipulated locally in the service of different projects and with effects well beyond the local.