Specters of Presence

2024 — Hebron, Palestine
Alternative site-specific exhibition (historic cave)
Curatorial Project

Curatorial Statement

“Specters of Presence / Appearance and Disappearance” emerged from a curatorial concern with the unstable condition of the city—how it appears, withdraws, and reconstitutes itself under pressure. Rather than treating disappearance as absence, the exhibition approached it as an active state through which space, memory, and identity are continuously reshaped.

The decision to realize the exhibition inside a reclaimed historic cave in Hebron was integral to this inquiry. The cave is not a backdrop, but a temporal and material agent: a space where the city folds inward, where layers of habitation, abandonment, and survival coexist. In this context, architecture does not frame the artworks; it participates in them.

By rejecting the prepared gallery and its stable visual order, the exhibition proposed an alternative mode of display—one that mirrors the city’s own condition, where presence is provisional and disappearance is never complete. This project initiated an ongoing curatorial practice grounded in site-specific and alternative spaces, in which each exhibition emerges from the spatial, social, and historical conditions of its location rather than being imposed upon it.