RETURNING documents through clay reliefs, photos, text, and personal vignettes of Vera Tamari’s family from Jaffa and Jerusalem. The stories and images portray the subtleties of life of members of a typical Palestinian urban middle-class community, capturing their social gatherings and daily activities from the early 20th century until 1948. They appear to live normally and follow the natural daily rhythm of life before their forced exodus and dispersal.

The resulting narrations are inherently not only about loss and displacement, but also about remembrance and renewal – in many ways, it is about ‘RETURNING’.

Vera Tamari will be in conversation with poet and writer Zuleikha Aburisheh. The discussion will be in Arabic.

Born in Jerusalem, Vera Tamari is a visual artist, Islamic art historian, art educator, and curator. She received her undergraduate degree in Fine Arts from Beirut  College for Women in 1966. She specialized in ceramics at the Istituto Statale d’Arte per la Ceramica in Florence, Italy in 1974 and obtained an M. Phil. Degree in Islamic Art and Architecture from the University of Oxford in 1984. She served for more than two decades as a professor of Islamic Art and Architecture and Art History at Birzeit University, where she also founded and directed the Virtual Gallery and the Birzeit University Museum between 2005 and 2010. During that period, she conceived the Cities Exhibition series, curating and co-curating three of its editions (2009-2012). Tamari is actively involved in the promotion of art and culture in Palestine and serves as an advisor and member of numerous institutions and cultural boards. She served as a jury member for YAYA (Young Artists Award organized by the Abdel Muhsin Qattan Foundation) and AFAC (Arab Foundation for Art and Culture). Tamari has exhibited widely since 1974 in Palestine, the Arab World, Europe, the UK, Japan, and the USA.

Zuleikha Aburisha is a poet, writer, researcher, and human rights activist. Her work focuses on art and literary criticism, women's and children's issues, and human rights. Aburisha aims to tackle obstacles to progress, democracy, and modernity. She explores language and gender through her writings on the subject. Aburisha published several children’s stories and studies on children's literature, a collection of short stories, and over ten volumes of poetry.