At the Palestinian exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the land itself becomes a witness.

The people and the landscape move together in harmony. Nature is not background scenery in the film installation by Palestinian artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme — it is memory, ancestry, grief, resistance, and survival. The work carries viewers through a journey of longing and resurfacing, of silence and breath, where Palestinians are not portrayed as abstractions of conflict but as people deeply rooted in the land itself.

Visitors enter the exhibit and inevitably find fragments of their own lives reflected back at them: family reunion, displacement, nostalgia, hope, mourning, and the circle of life and death. The work speaks across cultures because it taps into something universal — the human relationship to land, memory, and belonging. Yet it also remains unmistakably Palestinian.

That is what makes the exhibit so powerful.
For Palestinians, land is not merely territory. It is identity, sustenance, continuity, and inheritance. Olive groves, wild herbs, cactuses, flowers, music, dance, and village life are not symbols detached from politics; they are part of an indigenous relationship to place that generations fought to maintain despite repeated displacement.

The exhibit opens with the Sawsan flower — the iris flower common in Palestine and also a common female name across the Arab world. The flower becomes both a symbol of femininity and rootedness. Toward the end of the film, words appear on screen: “to be unseen, to create an opening, to crawl, to breathe.”

Those words capture a distinctly Palestinian condition. For decades, Palestinians across the diaspora often survived by muting parts of themselves — living politically and emotionally “undercover,” carrying grief quietly in countries that frequently rendered their history invisible or controversial. The exhibit suggests that something is shifting: that Palestinians are finally creating space to surface, breathe, and narrate themselves publicly.

The film repeatedly returns to the question of indigenousness and the violent rupture between Palestinians and their land that began in 1948, during what Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe. One of the historical references embedded in the work is the massacre of the village of Tantura near Haifa, where Palestinian residents were killed and displaced. Today, much of the village lies beneath a beach and parking lot. Yet even when villages were erased physically, their people survived. Palestinians from Tantura, Deir Yassin, and hundreds of destroyed villages continue to live across the world, carrying the memory of places many have never been allowed to return to.
Nature itself becomes an archive of that memory.

Across historic Palestine, cactus plants still grow where villages once stood. Palestinians traditionally planted cactus around village borders as natural protection. Unlike fences or walls, the cactus belonged organically to the landscape. Decades after villages were destroyed, the cactus remains — resilient, regenerative, impossible to fully erase. In Palestinian consciousness, it symbolizes both the survival of the land and the survival of the people.

The exhibit powerfully portrays the land resisting foreign impositions. Native plants become hardened and defensive. Thorns intensify. Even the Sawsan flower takes on an unsettling appearance, as if the land itself is reacting to violence inflicted upon it. Eventually, a woman emerges dancing at the center of the village, surrounded by her people, suggesting not only return but restoration.

Women occupy the spiritual center of the work. They are the carriers of continuity. Palestinian women are often imagined as extensions of the land itself: deeply rooted, life-giving, enduring. While Palestinian men are frequently constrained by prison, checkpoints, surveillance, and forced movement restrictions, women have often become the visible anchors of family and communal survival. There is a Palestinian saying: “Only our women can make it.”

The film’s images of imprisonment and fear also speak directly to the Palestinian experience in Jerusalem, where maintaining residency itself has become precarious. A haunting image of a pale young man terrified of prison evokes the reality faced by many Palestinians who have experienced detention under vastly unequal systems of law and punishment.

Yet the exhibit is not solely about grief. It is also about persistence.

Palestinians have endured repeated waves of dispossession — in 1948, 1967, 1982, and now again in the devastation unfolding since 2023. Across generations, Palestinians learned how to survive invisibility while preserving fragments of culture, memory, humor, music, and attachment to place. The exhibit at the Whitney reflects a moment in which that invisibility is breaking open.

What makes this exhibit particularly significant is not simply that Palestinian art is appearing in a major American museum. It is that the artists refuse to separate Palestinians from the land itself. In much Western discourse, Palestinians are often discussed only through the language of war, diplomacy, or security. Here, Palestinians are presented instead as indigenous people with ecological, cultural, spiritual, and ancestral ties to a living landscape.

That reframing matters profoundly.
The installation’s multiple screens echo one another like overlapping memories, while natural pillar-like structures root the visual experience physically into space. The result feels less like watching a film and more like entering a collective memory that had long been suppressed.

“To be unseen, to create an opening, to crawl, to breathe.”

At the Whitney, Palestinians are finally breathing in public.