By Robert Avila

Strip search: John Halaka's ink and acrylic Stripped of Their Identity and Driven from Their Land, from his series Forgotten Survivors (1993/1997/2003), stands out at "Made in Palestine."

After a successful initial run at the Station Museum in Houston, Texas, and despite the museum's determination to see it tour, the exhibit was turned down by 90 museums, according to Station director James Harithas. Its presence here is already a profound act of political resistance – an assertion of the Palestinian narrative, which for years has been systematically excluded.

The exhibit, which includes work from 23 artists from Israeli-occupied Palestine and several living in exile abroad, traverses that narrative from 1948 to the present, while resonating with a cultural memory reaching back millennia. The works assembled here vary drastically in style, medium, and influence – there are trained visual artists alongside inspired self-taught ones – but in winningly idiosyncratic ways, common themes emerge of loss, love, history, memory, exile, the land, the brutality of occupation, the inevitability of resistance, and the persistence of hope.

One of the first pieces is a large, white United Nations-issue tent, on which hundreds of Arabic names appear in black letters painstakingly woven into the cloth. Emily Jacir's Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages Which Were Destroyed, Depopulated, and Occupied by Israel in 1948 (2001) became the group project of the more than 140 people who accepted her offer to help sew the names of the villages into the material. Among them were Palestinians who came from one of those villages and Israelis who had grown up on their remains.

Opposite Jacir's tent, John Halaka's Stripped of Their Identity and Driven from Their Land (from the series Forgotten Survivors, 1993/1997/2003) takes up a whole wall with a dramatic exodus, a forced march of men and women and children. Made up of repeated rubber stampings in black ink of the word survivors against a gray acrylic background, the figures remain purposefully anonymous, speaking of others who have been driven from their homes and land.

A complex identification with the experience of displacement and exile through history comes across here, while challenging the still pervasive myth about the Nakba ("catastrophe") of 1948, which holds that the approximately 700,000 Palestinians displaced had willingly left their ancestral homes and land.

The brutality and terror of a colonial occupation – spearheaded by a U.S.-supplied modern military – find startling expression in several pieces. Among them, Rula Halawani's large black-and-white photographic stills printed in negative, from her series Negative Incursion (2002), cast scenes of aggression and devastation taken during an Israeli Defense Forces attack on Ramallah with a harrowing, almost demonic intensity. The inverted images capture the very essence of a world turned upside down.

Rana Bishara's fascinating Blindfolded History (2003) has images silk-screened in chocolate on 57 panes of glass (each for one year of Israeli occupation), most of them suspended at about eye level and the others mounted just behind on two walls forming a corner of the gallery. The images of Palestinian suffering and resistance play at various angles with each other and the viewer, setting up, especially with the metaphorical use of materials, an intriguing dynamic.

Nina Sinnokrot's Rubber-Coated Rocks (2002) runs the length of the floor along one wall. This carefully arranged row of polished rocks half-sheathed in a layer of black or yellow rubber has a powerful, contemplative beauty, while immediately bringing to mind the rubber-coated bullets used by IDF troops against stone-throwing Palestinian children. With equally potent, concrete simplicity, Rajie Cook's installation A Time to Cast Stones (2003) offers a large, dull green military ammunition crate filled entirely with stones.

Such pieces are pointedly ironic, wistful, reflective, aesthetically alluring, and full of supple meanings, though never morbid. In fact, while the starkness of Palestinian suffering undeniably comes across, there's surprisingly little gloom. Indeed, Samia Halaby's Palestine, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River (2003) bursts from the wall in a tangle of color. An abstract painting on irregular sections of canvas and paper, it forms a spectrum of lush shades – a revelry for the eye that simultaneously expresses a sensual yearning for a beloved landscape. Even Mary Tuma's Homes for the Disembodied (2000) – a sequence of black gossamer dresses reaching 12 feet to the floor, where they are connected by a loose winding stretch of the same material – maintains a quiet sense of abeyance, as if waiting to be inhabited. That animating spirit, which insists on surviving despite the odds, might be the most irrefutable gesture of all.

'Made in Palestine' runs through April 21. Tues.-Wed., noon-4 p.m.; Thurs.-Sat., noon-7 p.m.; Sun., noon-6 p.m., SomArts Cultural Center, 934 Brannan, S.F. (510) 548-0542.