Visitors last week at the new Palestinian Museum in Birzeit in the West Bank. It will open its doors on Wednesday despite being empty. Credit Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times

BIRZEIT, West Bank — When the $24 million Palestinian Museum opens on Wednesday, it will have almost everything: a stunning, contemporary new building; soaring ambitions as a space to celebrate and redefine Palestinian art, history and culture; an outdoor amphitheater; a terraced garden.

One thing the museum will not have is exhibits.

The long-planned — and much-promoted — inaugural exhibit, “Never Part,” highlighting artifacts of Palestinian refugees, has been suspended after a disagreement between the museum’s board and its director, which led to the director’s ouster. President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority and other dignitaries are expected to attend the opening ceremony, but a spokeswoman acknowledged on Sunday that “there will not be any artwork exhibited in the museum at all.”

Omar al-Qattan, the museum’s chairman, said Palestinians were “so in need of positive energy” that it was worthwhile to open even an empty building. “Symbolically it’s critical,” he said, conceding that the next phase, including the exhibits, “is the more exciting one.”

In the West Bank, where Palestinians have for years struggled to build political and civic institutions while resisting Israel’s occupation of the territory, the fate of the exhibition may say as much about the realities of Palestinian society as any art collection could. Since the signing of the Oslo peace accords with Israel in the mid-1990s, Palestinian cultural and social initiatives have often failed to gain traction and find consistent leadership.

Many Palestinian activists see the aging Mr. Abbas, 81, and his administration as increasingly feckless in their attempts to build an effective government, but a new generation has not risen to replace them. The museum is backed by a private organization, Taawon — Arabic for cooperation — and is not affiliated with any political entity.

Sam Bahour, a Palestinian business consultant and human rights activist, said that, considering the ossified state of many organizations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, a manager’s being forced out could be considered a sign of institutional health, or at least lively debate. But he called the decision to open the museum despite the dispute “shocking.”

“If there’s no substance,” Mr. Bahour said, “I wouldn’t open it.”

“Never Part,” developed over several years by the ousted director, Jack Persekian, was to feature artistic interpretations of things like keys and photographs that Palestinians around the world have kept from the homes they fled or were forced from in what is now Israel.

Mr. Persekian, who runs an art gallery called the Al Mamal Foundation for Contemporary Art in Jerusalem, said he had agreed to leave after the museum’s senior management unceremoniously told him that it no longer favored the project, but he said he did not know why.

A curator preparing the main exhibition hall of the Palestinian Museum last week. An exhibit highlighting artifacts of Palestinian refugees was scheduled to be shown at the opening, but has been suspended. Credit Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times

“I can’t fathom what happened,” he said, offering a succinct description of the result of his work for the museum: “Waste.”

Mr. Qattan, the museum chairman, said that his team had decided that Mr. Persekian had not sufficiently built expertise among staff members during his tenure of three and a half years, and that outside artists had criticized his conception of the exhibition.

“We didn’t feel that what was delivered was up to scratch,” Mr. Qattan said.

Although there are a number of what Mr. Bahour called “niche museums” in the West Bank and Gaza, the Palestinian Museum would be the largest institution of its kind.

The building, designed by Heneghan Peng, an architectural firm in Dublin, will host the high-profile opening ceremony a few days after the 68th anniversary of what Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe — essentially, Israel’s founding and the conflict that followed, which displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.

The spokeswoman said the ceremony was only to celebrate the completion of the building. She said it would be open to the public, free of charge, starting June 1, though it is unclear what will be inside to look at.

The museum announced in a news release this month that it had named a new director, Mahmoud Hawari, who it called “the lead curator at the British Museum”and a specialist in early Islamic art, architecture and archaeology, among other topics.

A spokeswoman for the British Museum would not confirm that Mr. Hawari held the position of lead curator there, saying only that “he was a visiting academic at the British Museum.” A spokeswoman for Taawon said on Monday morning that the information in the release was based on a curriculum vitae that Mr. Hawari had provided.

In the news release by the Palestinian museum, Mr. Hawari said it would be an institution that “links Palestinians together, at home and in exile, wherever they may live.”

The museum also announced that on May 25, it will open a “satellite exhibition” in Beirut, Lebanon, called “At the Seams: A Political History of Palestinian Embroidery.” Mr. Qattan said the Beirut show would be the first of many such exhibitions outside the West Bank, which is difficult for many people to visit.

The Palestinian Museum overlooking Birzeit. The museum’s chairman said Palestinians were “so in need of positive energy” that it was worthwhile to open even an empty building. Credit Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times

Tafeeda Jarbawi, the director of Taawon — formerly called the Welfare Association — said erecting the museum was a critical achievement itself. She said the understated lines of the structure, rising atop a terraced garden with carefully selected trees and other plants, expressed just what the organizers had hoped for.

“It’s as if the building is coming out of the womb, the Palestinian Mother Nature,” Ms. Jarbawi said. “Really, it fits with the contour of the land.”

Mr. Qattan said future exhibitions might explore the cultural meaning of martyrdom, the debate over which people inhabited the area first — and whether that question makes historical sense — as well as the more recent departures of religious and ethnic minorities.

“If we as an independent institution can’t tread into these tricky areas, then who is going to?” Mr. Qattan said. “Nobody is. That’s the power of culture.”

For “Never Part,” Mr. Persekian said he had collected images of countless artifacts from Palestinians around the world, conducted Skype interviews to document the stories behind those artifacts and planned to include physical objects as well. The objects would have been collected locally — across the West Bank for exhibitions in the museum here in Birzeit, a university town next to Ramallah, and in cities around the world for versions presented there.

Mr. Persekian said he had intended to make all this material available to artists whose work involves archival material and research, and the artists could have interpreted the objects as they saw fit. For those in charge of the museum’s finances, he said, that may have caused unease.

“Maybe they didn’t want to take a risk with something that is so unpredictable and so uncontrollable,” he said.

As for the parting in November, Mr. Persekian sought the high road, saying, “They are the owners,” and conceding that — as with any art project — no one can say how it would have turned out.

“You will never be able to take sides on this,” he said, “because you never know: They might be right, and I might be wrong.”

source: nytimes.com