In the beginning there was Anadiel.

The Al-Ma'mal Foundation for Contemporary Art was founded in 1998 but the story begins six years earlier with the Anadiel Gallery. Going through the Anadiel archives is already throwing up some fascinating facts and images as well as the two most aesthetically pleasing funding proposals I have ever seen. This early period was before digital cameras so there are very few digitised archive images available, however this recent scan shows how the gallery looked.  

Anadiel launched on the 20th January 1992 on Salahudin Street in East Jerusalem as a partnership between Jack Persekian and Issa Kassissieh and was originally intended to function as a business.  They hoped they could sell contemporary Palestinian art to visitors but particularly to Palestinians returning in the wake of optimism generated by the onset of the peace process. Although, some sales were made, business was never good enough to completely cover costs so as a commercial enterprise Anadiel never took off. However, in the early years what began as the first and only independent gallery in Palestine took on an important life of its own. As well as being an exhibition space for local artists it quickly became a gathering place, not only for artists but for an emerging Palestinian cultural network. 

The list of names that exhibited in Anadiel in those early years is impressive and includes many now internationally renowned like Suleiman Mansour, Tayseer Barakat, Nasser Soumi, Nabil Anani, Vera Tamari and Jumana Al Husseini. Two more, Khalil Rabah and Samir Srouji (whose Family Fortunes from 1994 is shown right), were to become founding members of Al-Ma'mal. 

As more connections were made, the discussions developed and new voices were heard. It became very clear that exhibition space alone wasn’t enough and that opportunities and resources for making art and finding and promoting new artists needed to be provided. What also became clear in the political context was that the principal focus of the gallery space needed to be Jerusalem and Palestine.

Talking to local artists, organising shows and begging for funds became Persekian’s life for several years. He then began looking outwards to the Palestinian Diaspora and international artists, hosting a groundbreaking project by French artist Jean Luc Vilmouth in 1994.  Vilmouth temporarily transformed Anadiel into the Café d'Olivier (or Olive Café). Central to the transformation of the gallery space was the presence of one of the most potent symbols of the conflict, an uprooted olive tree. This engagement of international artists with the situation in Palestine was to become one of the founding principles of Al-Ma'mal.