Dress from Gaza, 2000-2010

‘Perhaps the most important and moving object in the exhibition,’ says Dedman, this dress would have belonged to a girl. It belongs to Rafah Museum, ‘one of the museums in Gaza that was targeted by Israeli bombardments very early on in the current genocide’. When, in 2023, their collection was bombed, this dress was thrown onto a roof and rendered inaccessible for months. ‘It bears the marks of all that it’s been through,’ says Dedman. Representing just ‘a fraction of what the Palestinian people, and particularly those in Gaza, are and have been suffering’, it also, she says, ‘embodies the indestructibility of Palestine … this sense that despite all these horrors, Palestine will exist, will persist.’

Photograph: Grant Anderson