Palais de Tokyo

“Past Disquiet” is a documentary and archival exhibition that retraces the histories of political engagement and solidarity of artists within the international anti-imperialist movement from the 1960s through to the 1980s. The fruit of inquest initiated in 2008 by researchers and curators Kristine Khouri and Rasha Salti, the exhibition takes as its starting point the forgotten, transcontinental stories of four “museums in exile”, or ‘museums in solidarity’, conceived as touring exhibitions, they incarnated the support of artists worldwide to the struggle for liberation of the Palestinian and Nicaraguan people respectively, and the struggle against the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile and the apartheid regime in South Africa.

“The International Art Exhibition for Palestine”, which was held in Beirut in 1978 and which presented a collection of works of art intended for a future “museum in solidarity”, was the start of the project as a whole. Faced with a lack of institutional archives, the two researchers turned to private collections and collected oral history records by recording and filming interviews with people involved in the making of these four collections. The documents presented in Past Disquiet, gathered over the course of travel to Jordan, Syria, Morocco, Egypt, Italy, France, Sweden, Germany, Poland, Hungary, South Africa and Japan, sketch the intersecting networks that linked artists, activists and collectives around interventions, demonstrations, exhibitions and unique collections that have themselves criss-crossed the globe. “Past Disquiet” bears witness to the political engagement of these artists, as well as to the subversive nature of their practices.

Curators : Kristine Khouri and Rasha Salti