As an artist, writer, commentator and curator, Khaled Hourani is a critical voice in Palestine. Operating within a socially and politically constrained system, Hourani conveys his acute awareness of the nuances and vagaries that permeate different aspects of social encounters in Palestine. In his pivotal 2011 project Picasso in Palestine, Hourani borrowed Picasso’s Buste de Femme (1943) from the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, to display it in Ramallah. In a process that took two years, Hourani initiated a scheme aimed at connecting the world of modern and contemporary art with the unstable realities of Palestine. Among the complex range of theoretical and practical questions and readings his project inspired, this gesture tested Ramallah’s undefined bureaucratic infrastructures by creating a hallmark political event. Hourani is the artistic director of the International Academy of Art in Palestine and has curated exhibitions such as the Palestinian Pavilion for the São Paolo Biennale in Brazil in 2004 and he had a major retrospective at The Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow in 2014.