On the afternoon of June 24, 2011 Picasso’s 1943 portrait of his lover Francoise Gilot, Buste de Femme was exhibited on the grounds of the International Academy of Art Palestine in Ramallah in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The bringing of Picasso’s Buste de Femme to Ramallah was the culmination of a two-year collaborative effort between the Academy and the Van Abbenmuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. The project, which has been more widely advertised and which has attracted more media attention, conversation and analyses both local and international than any other project in the history of contemporary Palestinian art is-amongst other descriptions that have been used to define it-a case in the cultural politics of shaping and articulating through a resort to “imagination”- what it means to be a modern Palestinian subject living in a sovereign State-to-be. By drawing on studies of affect in cultural politics (Ahmed 2004, Massumi 2002P), I aim to explore the sensory and affective experiences evoked by Picasso’s iconic painting’s dislocation to Ramallah, namely through a discourse analysis of the media and public relations content of the project, field interview material, as well as published art journal critiques of the project by tracing the reading of the project across transnational space and locating it within the various discursive sites it unraveled within, in both the “global” arts circuit as well as the “local” cultural scene. What emerges is the centrality of the State in the project’s conceptualization and the disappearance of the Nation in its process of materialization. This compels us to rethink the notion of what counts as an instance of subversion in transnational processes of arts production by questioning the different forms that resistance through cultural practices take, the reasons they take them and how they transform with the passing of time.