Dan Walsh (DW)
Rochelle Davis (RD)
Catherine Baker (CB)

palestineposterproject.org

At the time of writing (August 31, 2024) the Palestine Poster Project Archives (PPPA) holds 21,455 posters by 4,636 artists. Check back tomorrow; there will be more.

The name: Palestine posters, not Palestinian posters, which the Archives founder patiently explains over and over again. The term “Palestine” embodies the international and intersectional reach of the archives; it’s not just a homogenous collection of art done by one people but rather, by a heterogenous gallery created by many peoples — Palestinians in Palestine and in diaspora, allies across the globe, Jews in solidarity with Palestinian claims for equal human rights, Zionists making their own claims. The term “Palestine” centers the geography, the land, from the river to the sea, as the essential factor for inclusion.

The PPPA is the world’s largest archives of physical (print-and-paper) Palestine posters. The only other collection of comparable size and quality was assembled by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Research Center, during its time in exile in Beirut. That archive was captured by the Israelis in their invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and then partially returned to the PLO in Algeria in 1983, to an unknown fate.¹

As with any ephemera, poster archiving is an act of valuing something that has a temporary purpose and whose value is in the messaging of the moment. The PPPA involves decisions, negotiations, relations, networks, and a cadre of vigilant artists and allies who submit content (some hand off a roll of posters they stashed under their bed in 1975, others send in one or a dozen JPEGs). The PPPA’s “Sightings” category, unique in its vision, documents posters in situ, gleaned from newspapers and books or submitted as photographs of posters in location. What other archive has not only the poster, but where and how the poster was used at the time of its creation?  Knowing when and how the poster was used, seen, and even responded to adds an anthropological dimension to the archive, documenting a poster’s connection to place and people.

Other archives of Palestine posters exist, such as at the American University of Beirut-Jafet Library (see work of Zeina Maasri), the International Institute of Social History (The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences), the Ethnographic and Art Museum at Birzeit University, the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, and the Museum of Design, Zurich, among others. Private collectors also have holdings, include Ezzeddine Qalaq from the 1960s and 1970s (see work of Rasha Salti) and Saleh (Abdel Jawad) Hamayel’s Intifada poster collection. But these are all smaller, overlapping subsets of the work found at the PPPA.

Perhaps one of the reasons the PPPA is as large as it is owes to its founder, Dan Walsh, identifying and incorporating bodies of posters as well as single or random items. For example the PPPA hosts Palestine posters in private collections such as the Steve Wachlin Collection (351); national libraries such as the Library of Congress Collection (87) ; major exhibits such as Palestine: A Homeland Denied (73) as well as those in museums such as that of the Palestinian Museum (73) and outlaw/radical/street actions such as the Double Erasure Exhibit (51), among many others. This approach can leverage an exhibit or collection that would only have been seen for a brief moment by a local audience into global, long-term visibility. It also helps contextualize the content, artists, publishers, sponsors and importantly, critics of the exhibit/collection. Presenting every work available also obviates any criticism that PPPA is censoring or editing works or collections for political advantage. Another benefit of identifying and including entire exhibits/collections is that this approach allows art historians, researchers, journalists, students and others to see every single work that was presented in the exhibit and to come to their own conclusions about the theme(s), artists, timing and effect of the exhibit, if any. Finally, archiving entire bodies of Palestine posters is an effective way of serving the objectives of conservation/preservation given that they represent rare concentrations of Palestine posters thereby facilitating the archival process immeasurably.

Poster collections on other topics also exist: Cuban revolutionary posters, Italian advertising posters, World War II propaganda posters, and more. Individual posters from these genres might be reproduced today and framed to hang as artwork or assembled into coffee table books. But these poster collections have end points (e.g., the end of the Spanish Civil War). The Palestine poster has no such end point, so far, and is the only one of these genres to transition from print to digital and to the internet. Posters had once been only ephemeral, printed on paper for pasting up outdoors; they often had a short, often local lifespan. But since the turn of the century, technology has changed how posters can exist, with most now created as digital files. Their bits and bytes are shared over the internet, and they have a different kind of life on phones and computers, with web access purchased and controlled by media companies, governments, and censors. In digital form, they are copied and turned into social media posts. Sometimes, they continue to be printed out, carried in demonstrations or posted on a wall, disintegrating in the weather, getting covered over by other posters, or being removed by authorities. These two registers have different ways of engaging with viewers, as well as engaging the one who “posts” them, whether on virtual or actual walls.

This era’s digital fluidity has led to a flourishing practice of “remixing”— taking images from older, iconic posters and reworking them anew. Combined with the long-standing Palestinian nationalist attitude of openness to whatever visual style (and language!) an artist in solidarity brings to the table, this remixing is producing a vocal, international, polyglot conversation. Also enhancing this discourse is the fact that artists in solidarity with Palestine are not looking to make a buck; of the thousands of Palestinian-published posters featured at the website, not a single copyright mark is visible.


Thus, for many artists working today, the PPPA serves as their go-to catalogue of imagery and inspiration. New artists consciously reuse imagery they find, borrowing something that conjures the memory of past artists and moments to make a new statement. In this spirit, the image from a 1990 poster, If the Olive Tree Knew, of a woman embracing an olive tree, has emerged time and time again over the last thirty years. The latest incarnation appeared during Israel’s 2024 assault on Palestine.

This visual conversation has developed a whole vocabulary of symbols, rich in both their directness as well as their clandestineness, since in the history of the Palestine liberation movement words have been made illegal, the flag declared illegal, Palestine declared to not exist, et cetera and so forth. Case in point: the Archives hold more than 350 posters featuring the watermelon, a visual synecdoche for the once-banned Palestinian flag and the verboten term Palestine.

As rich as is the Palestine Poster Archives, it is hard not to be constantly aware of what has not been archived. Just this month a Palestinian who grew up in the refugee camps in the West Bank in the 1950s and 1960s told one of us a story about the democratic Jordanian elections of 1958 (the point of the story) and how they remembered colorful election posters pasted on the refugee camp walls in the Jordan Valley (not the point of the story). There are no posters of these elections in the PPPA, most likely because no one ever saved them. How many visual moments from the past like this have vanished utterly?

Not so with the ongoing genocide in Gaza, which is livestreamed straight to our phones from the victims; posters follow apace. Indeed, the forces of war since Oct. 7 have triggered a tsunami of posters unprecedented in scale, internationalist scope, and intersectionality.

In the words of poet and activist Mohammed El-Kurd: “… this consequential moment calls on us to raise the ceiling of what is permissible, and demands that we renew our commitment to the truth, to spitting the truth, unflinchingly, unabashedly (and cleverly), no matter in what conference room, no matter in whose face.” 

As of April 23, 2024, the Archives already holds more 2,000 digital posters related to the events that began on October 7. And they are spitting the truth.

It’s not just the posters themselves that are flourishing, but so are — and these too are documented at the PPPA — exhibits, poster making workshops, poster-involved fundraisers, and grab ‘em and use ‘em poster sites.

[END]