Temporary Exhibit: Ordinary Lives

“Ordinary Lives imagines Palestinian existence as an unbroken continuum—a lineage of care, memory, and everyday beauty that stretches from ancient ritual to the present moment. Across the gallery, Mona Gazala’s photographic works and George Harb’s intimate family archive come together to affirm that Palestinian life is shaped not solely by survival, but by an enduring inheritance of joy, dignity, and deep interior worlds.

In Gazala’s images, ancestral echoes surface through gestures and objects that bridge archaeology and lived experience. Portraits that invoke ancient forms of veneration and photographs that draw on the quiet symbolism of archaeological fragments work in concert to honor the overlooked, the ordinary, and the deeply rooted. Whether reimagining the visual language of early ancestral practices or elevating humble shards as vessels of story, these works collectively underscore a truth that stretches across millennia: what persists is reverence—reverence for family, land, and the accumulated layers of Palestinian life.