RAMALLAH, West Bank — Jugglers and stilt walkers led the procession one recent evening from Manara Square to City Hall here in street theater meant to recall the first Palestinian intifada.
Back then, in the late 1980s, there was no Palestinian Authority, the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank was ubiquitous, and the Palestinians closed their movie theaters out of respect for the hundreds killed in clashes with Israeli soldiers.
In the 2014 version, part of a Palestinian arts festival held every two years, parkour acrobats leapt across the urban landscape as Palestinian Authority police officers stopped the traffic and two youths masked in black-and-white kaffiyehs surreptitiously distributed reprints of a 1988 leaflet with instructions for “the popular masses” from the underground intifada leadership.
But things took a bizarre turn when a plainclothes Palestinian security officer tried to arrest the two youths because the permit for the procession apparently did not extend to masks and leaflets.
“Sometimes art is more political than politics itself,” said Khaled Hourani, a Palestinian artist who helped organize the procession. “In a way,” he said of the mask episode, “it became part of the show.”
Putting on an arts biennale anywhere is complicated. Here, the festival, Qalandiya International, faced special challenges in catering to a Palestinian society that is highly politicized, physically fragmented, internally divided, partly autonomous but still struggling against Israeli occupation, and not given to displays of frivolity or celebration.
The timing of the biennale, from late October to mid-November, raised more questions about appropriateness, so soon after the death and destruction of this summer’s 50-day Gaza war.
“There was a discussion,” said Jack Persekian, director of the Palestinian Museum, now under construction, and an organizer. “But it is a celebration of continuity, of life, of steadfastness and, if I may, resistance. There was no doubt we should go on.”
If anything, the festival has served to underscore the intense interplay between art and the Palestinian cause.
The juggling sticks used by the performers from the Palestinian Circus School were red, green, white and black, the colors of the Palestinian flag.
Asked about the connection between the circus and the first intifada, Nayef Abdallah, 29, a circus director, said the circus showed “you can resist with your body and defend your land in a nonviolent way.”
“It’s better to juggle balls than to throw stones, because that can get you killed,” he said, adding, “We are creating a cultural army.”
Qalandiya International was named for the refugee camp and old village just beyond the wall that separates Jerusalem from the camp, Ramallah and the rest of the West Bank. The festival comprises dozens of events — exhibitions, lectures, discussion panels, tours, screenings and street activities. Its overriding theme, “Archives, Lived and Shared,” is an invitation to interpret some of the tools that help build national identity and collective memory.
Spread among the cities of the West Bank; East Jerusalem; Gaza; and Haifa, in northern Israel, locations that Palestinians cannot easily move between, the event also encompasses Palestinians from the diaspora and international artists from abroad.
At Al Bireh Municipality Cultural Center, Mr. Persekian curated an exhibition about Palestinian museums, many of them having sprung up since the arrival of the Palestinian Authority and after the second intifada ended.
Photographs from the Jenin Museum, established in 2011 in the local City Hall basement, show copper pots and traditional clothes as well as drawings and sculptures of Palestinian detainees forced into painful positions — an exhibit inspired, according to the Jenin curator, by the narratives of prisoners held in Israel.
The Palestinian Museum of Natural History in Bethlehem displays jars containing the snakes of Palestine. The Yabous Museum, established in 2009 in the Fara refugee camp in the West Bank, features a large, rusty key, a symbol of the Palestinian refugees and the demand for the right of return to their former homes in what is now Israel.
Al Hoash Palestinian Art Court in downtown East Jerusalem features works by Mohammed Abu Sal from Gaza. One is a colorful imaginary map of subway lines crisscrossing the coastal enclave. Others depict Photoshopped images of the entrances to sandy Hamas tunnels, like those used to ambush Israeli soldiers, but with Metro subway signs, shiny ticket machines and Western tourists lugging suitcases.
At two galleries in Gaza City, other local artists focused on the theme of the first intifada.
“The resistance fighter of the intifada of 1987 is the same fighter as today,” said Raed Issa, an artist whose home was destroyed in the recent fighting. “During the war, the idea of art was completely out of my mind,” Mr. Issa said. “Instead, I was thinking about how to save my life and rescue my family.”
And in the Qalandiya refugee camp, a project was underway to gather family photographs under the title, “Your Pictures, Your Memory, Our History.”
Salim Tamari, a professor of sociology and a senior fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies, in Ramallah, said Palestinian society had a long tradition of “mourning syndrome,” in which artistic endeavors were not viewed kindly at times of crisis.
“But I think we have overcome that in recent decades,” Mr. Tamari said, “because the artistic crowd has engaged more in cultural resistance and wedded its artistic activities to the political agenda of being engaged. This allowed artists to rid themselves of the label of frivolousness.”
Still, many of the exhibition halls have been empty after the openings. Two visitors at the exhibition in Al Bireh, a major in the Palestinian Authority police drug squad and a biology student, said they had wandered in by chance and had not previously heard about Qalandiya International.
“What are we doing, and for whom, is one of the big questions,” said Alia Rayyan, director of Al Hoash Palestinian Art Court. Highlighting some of the logistical problems, she said she had the works from Gaza shipped by courier service to Ramallah, then described her nerves as she drove the large map of Gaza subway tunnels through the military checkpoint into Jerusalem.
“What is cultural resistance?” Ms. Rayyan asked. “Nobody has an answer to this. Some say it is just to continue. Others say no, we have to think more about what we are doing.
“Perhaps it would have been a political statement not to do Qalandiya International.”