Palestine Will Be Free

Fall 2024

Coordinated by Damen Archard with Marcela Torres Molano

Palestine Will Be Free is an evolving project by Dark Opacities Lab that began as a workshop at the AHGSA conference in February 2024 at Concordia University, transformed into a zine, published with B&D Press in August 2024, and is now on display in the vitrine space of the Department of Art History through late November. 

For this project, Dark Opacities Lab went through the vast and rich resource of The Palestine Poster Project, an archive of nearly 20,000 posters in relation to Palestine, composed by nearly 4,000 different artists, and compiled by Dan Walsh. This archive is an invaluable resource in documenting the scale of Palestinian resistance and the place of aesthetics and design. In thinking through the political vernacular of these posters, we are necessarily asked to reckon with the place of visuality and visual culture in the realm of the political. Inspired by The Palestine Poster Project Archives, Dark Opacities Lab asked students and community members to create and contribute postcard-sized art in relation to and in solidarity with Palestinian anti-colonial resistance.

About Dark Opacities Lab: Founded in Fall 2023, Dark Opacities Lab is a hub of BIPOC political and aesthetic study and strategy. The lab engages with the evolving terms of opacity as a way to question the easy and extractive logics at play around race and representation, and to reorient around anticolonial struggles, global anti-racist social movements, and to center the intersectional and the internationalist. For more information about Dark Opacities Lab, check out their website.