When Pope Francis visited the Holy Land in 2014, he was also visiting Palestine, a country with a threatened population and an ongoing history of suffering caused by conflict and occupation. This body of work, which was created to honour his visit, also reflects some of the ironies of the current situation, and the complexity of the Palestinian identity, as a land and a people. 

The images, in many ways self-explanatory, are each made up of two works combined. In Dheisheh Refugee Camp, these works consist of prints from the UNWRA archive juxtaposed with present-day photographs of refugees; placed alongside one another, they ask how the lives of Palestinian refugees have changed or failed to change in the years following their dispossession. Exodus, exile and loss have been dominant themes of the Palestinian narrative since 1948, alongside a growing anger that the problems the country has faced for so long remain unsolved. However, perhaps equally synonymous with Palestine are words like endurance, survival, and faith - and looked at another way, it is these qualities, too, that the works seek to recognise. 

In Manger Square, meanwhile, similarly recent photographs of the Palestinian landscape and its people are combined with Western baroque paintings of biblical scenes. Both depict some version or other of Palestine, but little else seems to connect them. Such paintings interpreted episodes from the life of Christ as a means of glorifying God and spreading His teachings, but the photographs glorify nothing: produced by journalists for the media, they bear witness to mundane episodes in the often uncomfortable and difficult lives of Palestinians. The images are almost comically mismatched, expressing the extraordinary contrasts between the stories that have come from Palestine over the years, and the different ways in which visual art has reacted to them.