Without Permission
Main Exhibition, Palestine Design Week 2026
Jaghb House, Al-Masyoun, Ramallah, 15 to 24 September 2026
Exhibition Curator
Forty-five works by more than sixty-five designers and artists, and a house more than ninety-five years old: two floors, an attic and a large garden. That is what I had in front of me when I began.
I started with the people before the place. I sat with each designer and artist separately, while most projects were still a proposal on paper or research in progress. I asked about material before form: where it comes from, what it carries, what happens to it when it leaves the workshop or the home and enters an exhibition room. Some projects changed in those conversations; others found what they had been looking for all along. That dialogue was the longest part of the work, and the exhibition came after it.
Then the house joined the conversation. Jaghb House is not a gallery, and I did not want to turn it into one. Its rooms differ from one another, its stone is old, and its light shifts through the day. I read each room the way I read a work, and asked which pieces could live with the light from the windows, which needed darkness to be seen, and which had to go out into the garden and live with soil and air. That is how the exhibition came to be split between inside and outside, and the placement was a reading before it was a technical solution.
A third dialogue took place between the works themselves. Works on language sat beside works on the archive, and projects that build from what remains stood near works that return to land and plants, until each could be read in the light of the other.
“Without Permission” asked about a knowledge formed in homes, workshops and streets long before anyone called it design. I wanted the house to hold that question literally: to bring that knowledge back into a home, and to let people enter it the way one enters any house, through the door, into the rooms, up to the attic, and out into the garden.
