Dima Srouji presents Jaffa: Fragments from a Continuous Modernity as part of we refuse_d, a group exhibition at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha. Grounded in architectural research and historical inquiry, Srouji’s project revisits the unrealized 1946–48 master plan for the city of Jaffa—an ambitious proposal developed by the city’s last Palestinian mayor in an attempt to articulate a “modern” urban future to the British Mandate authorities and, in doing so, avert the city’s impending occupation.
Rather than approaching the plan as a lost utopia, Srouji treats it as a site of critical reflection. By resurrecting this vision of modernity, she interrogates the assumed alignment between progress, freedom, and self-determination. Her work exposes a central irony: in adopting the colonizer’s language and standards of “modernity,” the plan implicitly accepted the very framework that enabled dispossession. Through this lens, Jaffa: Fragments from a Continuous Modernity questions whether marginalized communities are compelled to perform legibility—and even liberation—within dominant systems in order to be allowed to exist.
Srouji’s practice situates architecture not merely as a physical structure, but as a political and ethical force. In a contemporary context where architecture is often mobilized as a weapon of control and violence, her work insists on its alternative possibilities: as a repository of memory, a vessel for collective spirit, and a foundation for imagining liberation. By fragmenting and reactivating the archival plan, Srouji opens a space where history is neither fixed nor resolved, but continually negotiated.
we refuse_d, curated by Nadia Radwan and Vasif Kortun, brings together fifteen artists whose practices engage with refusal, endurance, and action. The exhibition asks what it means to persist, resist, and create under conditions of silencing, censorship, and displacement. Developed through sustained dialogue between artists and curators, we refuse_d functions both as a collective statement and as a space of solidarity.
Echoing the spirit of the nineteenth-century Parisian Salon des Refusés, the exhibition foregrounds fragile optimism and resilience in moments of crisis. Featuring predominantly new commissions, the participating artists affirm art as a vital form of presence. Through acts of refusal, their works trace paths of persistence, resistance, heritage, community, collective care, and repair.
Within this context, Srouji’s contribution stands out as a poignant meditation on modernity, power, and memory—underscoring the necessity of art as a means of bearing witness, sustaining life, and insisting on the possibility of liberation.
