Impact: ​Curating Walled Off Hotel with Banksy

Exhibits within the Museum include a Victorian-style mechanical automaton depicting the signing of the Balfour Declaration with more material being added over time.

Empowering or baffling?

“It's meant to be a space that's both empowering and informing for people," Dr Grindon told CNN.

Emma Graham-Harrison from The Guardian commented: “A small museum explains the wall, the controls on movement and the troubled history of the region. 'If you are not completely baffled, then you don’t understand,' the presenter of a video history signs off.”

Dr Grindon previously worked with Banksy on the deliberately depressing theme park Dismaland in Weston-Super-Mare in 2015 - helping to create the Museum of Cruel Designs.

This new venture in the Middle East offers views of graffiti-strewn concrete from every room.

The Walled Off Hotel is a three-storey immersive piece of art and also a fully functioning hostelry. Situated just five metres inside the huge security wall that separates Israel from the Palestinian territories, it enjoys direct sunlight for just 25 minutes a day.

A view to make you think

“It has the worst view of any hotel in the world,” says owner Banksy. He has secretly converted a former pottery workshop under the shadow of an army watchtower into "a hotel, tea shop, home-made museum with en-suite art gallery and graffiti supplies store - an all-inclusive vandals resort.” Many of the bedrooms and hallways have been decorated by Banksy with his trademark stencils in what constitutes his largest new body of work for many years. He has even designed some of the menu items.

In acknowledgment of Britain’s historic role in the region, the hotel is decorated to resemble an English gentleman’s club from colonial times. High Tea is served in fine china to the sound of tinkling on a baby grand piano. However, the refined ambience has been brought right up to date - the oil painted seascapes are awash with refugee’s lifejackets, statues choke on tear gas fumes and cherubs fall to earth starved of breath.