🎨 Great Exhibitions #21 — Three Palestinian Voices Across the Randstad 🇵🇸

Amsterdam → Rotterdam → Breda → (Den Haag) · Saturday 20 June 2026

Three exhibitions. Three cities. One day. And one of the most urgent conversations in contemporary art right now.

This chapter of Great Exhibitions is a special one. Right now, at least three Dutch institutions are showing the work of Palestinian artists — and rather than pick one, we're going to do something a little mad: see all three in a single day, travelling together by train across the Randstad.

It's a heavy subject, there's no pretending otherwise. The shadow of Gaza falls across all of it. But here's the thing that struck me: without human resilience and creativity, each of these shows would be a requiem — and yet none of them is. However heavy the subject, every single work bursts with vitality, defiance and hope. That's exactly why they belong together: three completely different artistic languages, circling the same questions of memory, survival and what it means to keep living.

##### 🚉 The route📍 10:00 — Amsterdam · Wereldmuseum* Larissa Sansour — Rogue Agents of History
The first-ever Dutch presentation of this internationally acclaimed artist, in a sublime installation curated by Nat Muller. Sansour works in film, weaving myth, documentary and science fiction — and here the films spill out into the room as objects: historical loans (reliquaries, a hand-embroidered thobe from the 1890s), personal heirlooms, film props displayed like treasures. In Familiar Phantoms, a hypnotic 42-minute documentary, four generations of displacement flicker past like curtains moving in the wind. In her brand-new A Sunken Tale of Losses Delayed, a pirate ship sails across time, picking up Palestinian castaways from different eras — a dreamlike, fairy-tale world that loops the past into the present and back again.

Then we take the train together to Rotterdam.

📍 13:00 — Rotterdam · Kunstinstituut Melly *Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme — Prisoners of Love: Until the