Mohamed Badarne, from Untold Palestine, is visiting Philadelphia for a one-night pop-up photography exhibition (all works for sale!). The evening will include Mohamed in conversation with La La Lil Jidar photographer, Aisha Mershani, and a Reading Circle of excerpts from Passages Through Genocide.

Photo credits:

Photo 1: Samar Abo Elouf

Photo 2: Hosam Salem

Photo 3: Fatima Shabir

Untold Palestine (https://untoldpalestine.com/en/ IG: @untoldpalestine) is a social media platform launched in 2020. The goal of the project is to tell stories of the everyday lives of Palestinians, with their small and big achievements and dreams, as a counter-narrative to the stereotypical image of a faceless mass or iconic figures defined by violence and suffering. During the last 10 months, Untold Palestine has been organizing exhibitions all around the world for Gazans photographers titled “Gaza Habibti” in the United States, Germany, Spain, and Jordan as part of the Image festival.

Passages Through Genocide is a collection of texts from Palestinian writers confronting the genocide in Gaza to lift up their words by sharing, printing, publishing  and distributing these texts by all possible means in support of Palestinian liberation.

Aisha Mershani(they/them) was born in Las Vegas, Nevada to an American Jewish mother and a Moroccan Muslim father. Mershani holds a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology and Anthropology from the University of Redlands in California, and a Master’s and a Ph.D. degree from the UNESCO program in Peace, Development Studies, and Conflict Transformation at the Universitat Jaume I in Castelló de la Plana, Spain. From 2003-2022 Mershani focused their subject on the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Aisha has photographed military checkpoints, popular demonstrations, house demolitions, destroyed villages, and the daily lives of Palestinians living under the violence of the Israeli occupation. Mershani’s photographs have been in multiple publications, as well as many internet news sites over the years to further the awareness of the ongoing situation on the ground in Palestine. Aisha is also one of the artists in the reference book, “Encyclopedia of Arab American Artists”. Aisha Mershani is currently an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Gettysburg College and combines their scholarly work with their media activism.

La La Lil Jidar is a collective of artists dedicated to arts and community experiences rooted in understanding Palestine through the photography of Aisha Mershani.