In 2025, we held our Spring Sessions residency outside Jordan for the first time. We spent three months in Bethlehem at the Wonder Cabinet.
The Wonder Cabinet is a multi-purpose, non-profit exhibition and production space overlooking the Al-Karkafeh Valley in Bethlehem, whose climbing landscape, dotted with stone terraces and olive trees, is spoiled by the view of a settlement that used to be a forest twenty-something years ago. It was inaugurated in 2023 and since then has welcomed a large number of artists and programs. It aims to provide workspaces for Palestinian artists and engineers, designers and producers alike and to bring to life a regional hub for creativity and artisanal learning. It was awarded the 2025 Aga Khan Award for Architecture.
Within this setting, our learning program took shape as part of the Wonder Cabinet’s Fall residency, drawing on Bethlehem’s connection to Amman and longer histories of movement, trade, and exile across the region. Through visits to museums, private collections, and the surrounding landscape, alongside films, conversations, and making together, we spent time with the city and its stories, tracing both what endures and what is being erased. We moved between questions of language, land, ecology, and memory, and what it means to work in the present under ongoing violence and uncertainty. Grounded in collective practice, the program opened space to reflect, question, and imagine other ways of working, learning, and being together.
Participating artists: Abboud Abu Tair, Haya Abu Warda, Ayed Arafah, Nazeema Asmar, Obayda Dahly, Hana Elias, Abdulrahman Hashlamon, Majd Hijjawi, Shiraz Khattab, Sarah Risheq, Adham Sinan, and Nisreen Tahhan.
Curatorial team: Noura Al Khasawneh, Parastoo Anoushahpour, Victoria Dabdoub, and Toleen Touq.
The program culminated in All the Wild Places, open studios of the residency at the Wonder Cabinet. Throughout the program, the “wild” became a powerful metaphor, alluding to places that resist clear definitions and refuse containment, remaining unruly, tender and playful. The open studios present a cartography of places that span physical geographies and immaterial worlds. The artists explore energies and desires that move from land, city and home, into the intimate spaces within the body, mind, and dreams.
All the Wild Places invites audiences to inhabit these untamed places and explore sites of the everyday that contain more than they reveal. Emerging through personal and communal processes, the artworks weave stories of quiet rebellions and soft gestures that speak to a longing for wilder ways of being.
Artists share works that have emerged from their time in Bethlehem and its surroundings like Solomon’s Pools, the Cremisan Valley, and others. Spanning photography, video, film, drawing, performance, installation, and sound, the works appear as resolved pieces, works in progress, and moments within longer trajectories.
Collective projects developed during the residency navigate geography, language, and temporal rhythms, centering sites like the Wonder Cabinet garden and others that sparked inquiry in Bethlehem’s urban fabric of cafés, markets, and alleyways. As our home for three months, the Wonder Cabinet became a site of study, communal work, and encounters with the wider community.
All the Wild Places. Photos by Ilaria Speri
