Unsilencing Palestine : 100 years after Frank Scholten
Dutch Flemish Institute | Cairo, Egypt | 19-23 November 2023During the turbulence of the period after the First World War, Dutch photographer Frank Scholten (1881-1942) travelled to Palestine with the aim of producing an ‘illustrated Bible.’ He first travelled through Italy and Greece in 1920, arriving in Palestine in 1921 where he would stay for two years. While the bulk of his photo collection consists of images of Palestine, his camera lens also gives us a wider snapshot of modernity in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Scholten gives us a rare view of a very particular world that would set in motion the events which shape the region today. Scholten’s documentary approach to photography gives us scenes of an everyday modernity in Palestine with a particular attention to ethnography. His lens shows us the complicated mosaic of communities in the Eastern Mediterranean at a moment when the impacts of the war cemented competing nationalisms.
This exhibition that took place at the NVIC Netherlands - Flemish Institute in Cairo, consisted of four broad sections. In the foyer downstairs, four pairs of panels with eight images and accompanying texts were displayed. The four panels had the following themes: Making it Modern in Palestine - Overlapping and Troubled Identities - Building the Nation: New Industries in an Ancient Land - Reinventing Ritual: The Changing Nation and the Establishment of Colonial Rule. A selection of eight of these 32 images were enlarged and hung in sequence in the stairway for visitors to view more in detail.
Prints were sold to support Palestinian university students in Egypt
related projects
Frank Scholten : Photographing Palestine - Film
Frank Scholten: Archaeology and Tourism in the ‘Holy Land’ - Exhibition
Imaging and Imagining Palestine: Photography Modernity and the Biblical Lens, 1918-1948 - Book