Palestine Museum to open Edinburgh venue

The Palestine Museum US will open a satellite venue in Edinburgh on 17 May. The museum’s director Faisal Saleh says it will be “the first museum in Europe wholly dedicated to contemporary Palestinian art”.

Saleh told the Art Newspaper that by expanding to the new site from its home in Connecticut, US, the museum aims to “provide a vital platform for Palestinian voices” to challenge dominant narratives and showcase Palestine’s “rich cultural heritage”.

The Edinburgh venue will be run by local volunteers, with Saleh overseeing their work remotely. Its first exhibition will feature Palestinian art from the last decade. 

Saleh said that the new museum is “crucial in the face of Western media’s persistent negative coverage of Palestine and the alarming cancellations of Palestinian events”.

Across the UK, a number of planned events focusing on Palestinian culture have been cancelled since the beginning of the war between Israel and Hamas in 2023.