This work is an attempt at image-based historiography. Building on formal innovations in criticism practiced by Modernist cultural theorists such as Benjamin, Adorno, Kracauer, and Bloch, I have been developing methods of “image-based criticism”—responding to the one-word injunction in one of Benjamin's scattered “theses” : Bilderkritik --which I understand to mean criticism not of but through images. This work is shaped by another experimental form, the Denkbild, or “thought-image.” Denkbild is the name Benjamin gave to a series of short (largely still untranslated) critical fragments; it is the form he employs in One Way Street, the form Adorno explores in Minima moralia. Adorno analyzes the form in an essay on One Way Street where he conceives of the Denkbild as part thought, part language, part image, and part dream.
Important for this attempt at an image-history of the first decade of the 21st century is Benjamin's derivation of the term Denkbild from the Dutch word for emblem, that quintessential baroque hybrid of text and image, combining inscriptio, pictura, and subscriptio. On one level, this work is composed as an emblem, with the uppermost text serving as the inscriptio, or title, the main body of the work as the allegorical pictura, and the bottommost text as the exegetical subscriptio. This latter text consists in Benjamin’s well-known conception of the “Angel of History” from his Theses on the Philosophy of History, in which he offers an allegorical reading of the drawing by Paul Klee in his personal collection. So on another level, this work consists in a Klebbild (collage) of Benjamin’s Denkbild of Klee’s Bild. In the spirit of Benjamin’s famous plan to produce a work consisting exclusively in quotations, this work undertakes an assemblage of found text and image that explores how the principle of montage may be extended to traditionally text-based fields of historiography, sociology, ethnography, cultural, social, and political criticism-- how montage, as a principle of composition and strategic presentation, can communicate scholarly research, conceptual and theoretical knowledge through images alone and without discursive recourse to words. As Benjamin states of the Arcades Project: "The method is montage," “I need say nothing. Only show.”
Materially, this work consists in hundreds of hand-cut images culled from Reuters photo archive that document historical events from September 11th, to the wars in Iraq, from the destruction of Jenin to Abu Graib, from G.W. Bush’s State of the Union Address, to Guantanamo, to Berlusconi’s victory celebration. Materials also include cut money, cut up theory books and newspapers, ink, black tea, and glue.
I present the collage with an accompanying map, and by using the grid overlay the viewer can pinpoint particular images or text and then consult the accompanying "legend" to identify the historical and textual events depicted in each of the images, or text fragments.
Mixed media collage (books, newspapers, money, news photographs, black tea, ink) 16" x 20", 2009 (Destroyed by Fire, 2020)
Notebook sketch for "Angelus novus"
A tragically expanding series of analog photo-montages that endeavors to represent the human cost of major military assaults by Israel on Gaza between 2004-2022. Each work consists of images in the public domain that documented the event in real time, including photojournalism disseminated across news and social media platforms, and images uploaded directly to Facebook by active IDF soldiers and by civilians on the ground in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel. (2014-2022).
Operation Rainbow began as retaliation for two attacks on M113 armored vehicles in the “buffer zone” along the southern Gaza Strip in which eleven Israeli soldiers were killed. Israel Defense Forces (IDF) entered the buffer zone to sift through the sand for scattered human remains to ensure proper burial. While sifting through the sand, the soldiers were covered by snipers barricaded in the civilian occupied homes of Palestinians. The subsequent ground invasion and siege of Rafah had the stated aim to locate and destroy smuggling tunnels connecting the Gaza Strip to Egypt. The siege was part of an ongoing demolition of civilian homes to expand the militarized buffer zone. Since 2001, the IDF has routinely demolished Palestinian houses in Rafah, first to create and then expand the zone. In 2002, the IDF destroyed hundreds of houses in Rafah to erect an eight-meter high 1.6-kilometer-long metal wall along the border. Between April 1, 2003, and April 30, 2004, 487 more houses were demolished in Rafah. According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), 298 additional civilian homes were destroyed by the IDF during the six-day siege in Operation Rainbow, leaving thousands more homeless. Israeli D9 bulldozers tore up roads extensively, causing severe damage to sewage and water networks. At least 700 dunams of agricultural land were destroyed. Human Rights Watch reported 59 Palestinians killed from 12–24 May, including 11 under age eighteen and 18 armed fighters. In its initial phase, the ground invasion passed through the Rafah Zoo, destroying the facility, and leaving a trail of scattered animal carcasses in its wake.
Analog photomontage; 20" x 30" (2016; Destroyed by Fire 2020; Remade 2021)
Israel Defense Forces military campaign in the Gaza Strip launched in response to Al-Qassam rockets fired into Israel. Following March 2 launched a ground invasion of the northern Gaza Strip to occupy Jabalia and Shuja'iyya. During Operation Hot Winter, 107 Palestinians were killed including 27 children and six women. Over 200 people were also injured, more than one fourth of whom were children.
Analog photomontage, 20" x 30" (2016; Destroyed by Fire 2020; Remade 2021)
At 11:30 am on December 27, 2008, Israel launched Operation Cast Lead. It began with a wave of hitting 100 targets within a span of 220 seconds. The Israeli government's stated goal was to stop Palestinian rocket fire into Israel and weapons smuggling into the Gaza strip. The massive bombardment continued until January 3, 2009, when the Israeli army invaded the Strip from the north and east. Israel's navy also shelled Gaza from offshore. Israel’s indiscriminate shelling of densely populated civilian areas with white phosphorus is well documented and was deemed a war crime by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. White phosphorus is an extremely toxic chemical agent that self-ignites on contact with air, burns fiercely at a temperature of up to 2,760 degrees Celsius (5,000 degrees Fahrenheit), keeps burning for days, and can ignite cloth, fuel, ammunition, and other combustibles. Contact with the chemical burns deep holes in the human body that carry an increased risk of mortality due to the absorption of phosphorus through the burned area. On January 12, it was reported that more than 50 phosphorus burns victims were in Nasser Hospital alone, and there is extensive photo documentation of civilian injuries from the agent, including children. On January 16, the UNRWA headquarters was hit with phosphorus munitions, setting the compound ablaze. In July 2009, the Israeli NGO Breaking the Silence published testimony from 26 soldiers who took part in the Gaza assault, claiming that the IDF used Gazans as human shields, improperly fired incendiary white phosphorus shells over civilian areas, and used overwhelming firepower that caused needless deaths and destruction. In the aftermath of the offensive, a UN-appointed fact finding mission found strong evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by both the Israeli military and Palestinian militias. Investigations by human rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch came to the same conclusion. It is estimated that Israeli airstrikes, bulldozers, tanks, and phosphorus shelling demolished nearly 4,000 civilian homes, 600–700 factories, workshops, and businesses, 24 mosques, 31 security compounds, and 10 water or sewage lines throughout the Gaza Strip. More than 20,000 people were left homeless. The World Health Organization said that 34 health facilities (8 hospitals and 26 primary health care clinics) were damaged over the course of the offensive. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), over 50 United Nations facilities sustained damage. A satellite-based damage assessment of the Gaza Strip by the United Nations revealed 2,692 destroyed and severely damaged buildings, 220 impact craters on roads and bridges with an estimated length of 167 km (104 mi) of paved and unpaved roads damaged, 714 impact craters on open ground or cultivated land with an estimated land area of 2,100 hectares (21 km2), 187 greenhouses completely destroyed or severely damaged with an estimated area of 28 hectares (0.28 km2), and 2,232 hectares (22.32 km2) of demolished zones targeted by the IDF. Human Rights organizations and the UN counted just above 1,400 Palestinian deaths. Israel acknowledged 1,166 deaths. According to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), among the Palestinian deaths were 926 unarmed civilians, 255 police officers, and 236 fighters. During the war, 3 Israeli civilians were killed by rocket attacks. A total of 10 Israeli soldiers were killed in the war, of whom 6 were killed by enemy action and 4 were killed by friendly fire.
Analog photomontage, 20" x 30" (2016; Destroyed by Fire 2020; Remade 2021)
Analog photomontage, 20" x 30" (2016; Destroyed by Fire 2020)
The most recent Israeli siege of Gaza earlier this year was triggered on May 6, when Palestinians began protests in East Jerusalem over an anticipated decision of the Supreme Court of Israel on the eviction of six Palestinian families in the Arab neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah; under international law, the area belongs to the occupied Palestinian territories. On May 7, Palestinian protesters threw stones at Israeli police forces, who then stormed the compound of the al-Aqsa Mosque, using tear gas, rubber bullets and stun grenades. The IDF siege of the compound during the month of Ramadan prompted mass protests across the West Bank and around the world. The ensuing violence on May 8 coincided with Qadr Night, the holiest night of Ramadan. Early reports estimated that around 4,360 rockets were fired towards Israel from Gaza, and that Israel conducted 1,500 air, land and sea strikes against Gaza. Widespread protests and riots intensified across Israeli cities with large Arab populations. On May15, the IDF destroyed the al-Jalaa Building in Gaza, which housed Al Jazeera and Associated Press journalists. The single deadliest incident of the campaign occurred on May 16, when Israeli warplanes fired 11 missiles along a 200-yard stretch of Wehda Street, in the upscale Rimal neighborhood. According to the IDF, a Hamas tunnel and underground command center were the targets of the attack which destroyed two residential buildings, killing 44 civilians. The airstrikes dislodged the foundations of civilian buildings above them, causing them to collapse because IDF's calculations had failed to anticipate the impact on nearby buildings. The Israeli Air Force carried out another series of raids against Hamas' tunnel network on May 17, bombing over 15 kilometers of underground passages. The homes of nine Hamas commanders and a home used by Hamas' military intelligence branch were also bombed.; 232 housing units in high-rises were bombed over 11 days. According to a May 23 post-ceasefire UNOCHA estimate, 258 buildings were destroyed, comprising 1,042 housing and commercial units, while 769 further units suffered severe damage, as did 53 schools, 6 hospitals, and 11 clinics. The United Nations reported that as of May 19, more than 72,000 Palestinians had been internally displaced as in the wake of the siege. The UN and Human Rights Watch reported that 260 Palestinians had been killed, half of them (129) civilians, including 66 children and 40 women. The Gazan Health Ministry stated 1,948 individuals were wounded, of whom 610 were children, and 400 women, four of whom were pregnant. Thirteen people were killed inside Israel, including two children, one Indian woman, and two Thai men working in Israel. As of May 12, Israel reported at least 200 injured Israelis. In late July 2021, Human Rights Watch (HRW) raised the possibility that both parties in the conflict had engaged in war crimes based on initial field reports. The organization cited several Israeli airstrikes that appeared to have killed entire families in areas where no military targets existed. The firing of unguided rockets from Gaza towards Israeli civilian centers was also deemed a war crime.
Analog photomontage, 20" x 30" (2021)
A large hand-cut collage consisting in photographs I took during the three years I lived in the West Bank. Ein Fawwar is a natural spring near Jericho, mentioned in the Bible, whose waters fed Herod's pleasure palace. Today, Ein Fawwar is one of the last nature retreats accessible to Palestinians in the West Bank, where they can escape the bustle and dust of cities like Ramallah for swimming and recreation (although the spring is run by the Israeli park service and is surrounded by strategically positioned settlements). Al Kauthar, which means "spring" or "abundance،" is the title of the shortest verse in the Qur'an, which describes the bounty of God's gift of paradise to humankind. At the center of the work is a photograph of the spring’s source, still surrounded by a circular Roman wall; the collage radiates out from this center in concentric circles moving geographically northward from the spring to Jericho, to the hills and city of Ramallah, to the refugee camps of Al-Amary and Qalandya, to the garbage-filled no man’s land along the segregation wall, to Jerusalem, lying just beyond the wall. Allegorically, the radiation out from the center traces salvific history from creation to the fall, through the rise of civilization to Armageddon. Anthropologically, the radiation traces the emergence of humanity out of animality, from the fabrication of the first tools to the agricultural revolution, from the establishment of the first cities up to the present day destruction of the Ramallah hills and life under the occupation.
عين فوار...الكوثر (Ein Fawwar...Al-Kauthar)
Photocollage, 96" x 96", 2015
(Ein Fawwar...Al-Kauthar)
Photo-collage, 96" x96" (2015)
Hanging in the group show, "The Three Traumas," curated by Jorge Alberto Perez for the CCNY Baxter Street gallery, New York.
http://www.jorgealbertoperez.com
http://www.baxterst.org/exhibitions-3/the-three-traumas-exhibition/
Discussing allegorical and political elements in "عين فوار...الكوثر (Ein Fawwar...Al-Kauthar)" at the opening of "The Three Trauma" curated by Jorge Alberto Perez for the CCNY Baxter Street Gallery, New York
Photocollage, 96" x 96", 2015
عين فوار...الكوثر (Ein Fawwar...Al-Kauthar)
Photocollage, 96" x 96", 2015
عين فوار...الكوثر (Ein Fawwar...Al-Kauthar)
Photocollage, 96" x 96", 2015
(Ein Fawwar...Al-Kauthar)
Photo-collage, 96" x96" (2015)
عين فوار...الكوثر (Ein Fawwar...Al-Kauthar)
Photocollage, 96" x 96", 2015
عين فوار...الكوثر (Ein Fawwar...Al-Kauthar)
Photocollage, 96" x 96", 2015
عين فوار...الكوثر (Ein Fawwar...Al-Kauthar)
Photocollage, 96" x 96", 2015
عين فوار...الكوثر (Ein Fawwar...Al-Kauthar)
Photocollage, 96" x 96", 2015
Detail from, عين فوار...الكوثر (Ein Fawwar...Al-Kauthar)
Photocollage, 96" x 96", 2015
عين فوار...الكوثر (Ein Fawwar...Al-Kauthar)
Photocollage, 96" x 96", 2015
عين فوار...الكوثر (Ein Fawwar...Al-Kauthar)
Photocollage, 96" x 96", 2015
عين فوار...الكوثر (Ein Fawwar...Al-Kauthar)
Photocollage, 96" x 96", 2015
عين فوار...الكوثر (Ein Fawwar...Al-Kauthar)
Photocollage, 96" x 96", 2015
عين فوار...الكوثر (Ein Fawwar...Al-Kauthar)
Photocollage, 96" x 96", 2015
عين فوار...الكوثر (Ein Fawwar...Al-Kauthar)
Photocollage, 96" x 96", 2015
عين فوار...الكوثر (Ein Fawwar...Al-Kauthar)
Photocollage, 96" x 96", 2015
عين فوار...الكوثر (Ein Fawwar...Al-Kauthar)
Photocollage, 96" x 96", 2015
عين فوار...الكوثر (Ein Fawwar...Al-Kauthar)
Photocollage, 96" x 96", 2015
عين فوار...الكوثر (Ein Fawwar...Al-Kauthar)
Photocollage, 96" x 96", 2015
عين فوار...الكوثر (Ein Fawwar...Al-Kauthar)
Photocollage, 96" x 96", 2015
عين فوار...الكوثر (Ein Fawwar...Al-Kauthar)
Photocollage, 96" x 96", 2015
عين فوار...الكوثر (Ein Fawwar...Al-Kauthar)
Photocollage, 96" x 96", 2015
عين فوار...الكوثر (Ein Fawwar...Al-Kauthar)
Photocollage, 96" x 96", 2015
عين فوار...الكوثر (Ein Fawwar...Al-Kauthar)
Photocollage, 96" x 96", 2015
عين فوار...الكوثر (Ein Fawwar...Al-Kauthar)
Photocollage, 96" x 96", 2015
عين فوار...الكوثر (Ein Fawwar...Al-Kauthar)
Photocollage, 96" x 96", 2015
عين فوار...الكوثر (Ein Fawwar...Al-Kauthar)
Photocollage, 96" x 96", 2015
عين فوار...الكوثر (Ein Fawwar...Al-Kauthar)
Photocollage, 96" x 96", 2015
عين فوار...الكوثر (Ein Fawwar...Al-Kauthar)
Photocollage, 96" x 96", 2015
عين فوار...الكوثر (Ein Fawwar...Al-Kauthar)
Photocollage, 96" x 96", 2015
عين فوار...الكوثر (Ein Fawwar...Al-Kauthar)
Photocollage, 96" x 96", 2015
عين فوار...الكوثر (Ein Fawwar...Al-Kauthar)
Photocollage, 96" x 96", 2015
عين فوار...الكوثر (Ein Fawwar...Al-Kauthar)
Photocollage, 96" x 96", 2015
This work in progress consists in image-research I am conducting in the “lifestreaming” of Israeli soldiers to their profiles on Facebook. For the past three years, I have analyzed thousands of images and videos posted by soldiers to their profiles between 2005 and 2016, across social networks spanning all six districts of Israel, settlements in the West Bank and Golan, and Druze communities. What emerges through a systematic study of the images and videos posted by soldiers across hundreds of profiles--moving geographically from network to network, battalion to battalion, across regions, and across time--are recurrent cultural image-patterns, consistent across time, geographic location, ethnicity and class. The self-curated, living image-archives of soldier profiles on Facebook open windows onto the intimate relations of everyday life in Israel, windows that offer the visual critic unprecedented access to the broad field of social relations at play across private and public spheres in Israeli society. A number of discernible cultural Image-patterns recur with astonishing consistency across soldier networks over the past decade to reveal processes of socialization within the institutions of home, school, and army, as well as within uniform social spaces and rites of passage such as proto-military youth camps, state-organized school trips to Auschwitz, army-base and barracks culture, military training camps, activity on the front during military operations, and at invariable travel destinations on the “grand tour” soldiers traditionally take upon completion of their service.
Demonstrating a cultural pattern visually, through images alone, illuminates aspects of social reality and culture that have proven resistant to conventional methods of, say, sociology, ethnography or cultural analysis. For example, homoeroticism & patterns of intimacy between men that are central to constructions of masculinity and homosocial relations—not only in in Israel, but in the Middle East more generally—have not found adequate representation in existing scholarship. Discursive representation proves an inadequate medium for revealing the libidinal circuits undergirding relations between men in regions, such as the Middle East, where male relations assume patterns of intimacy that are not readily subsumed under available heteronormative categories. The inadequacy of discursive representation, I believe, lies not in repression, social stricture, or unconscious prejudice in the viewpoints of both observer and observed; the inadequacy stems rather from the simple fact that what is visible to the outside observer is, because locally normative within the desiring field of male relations itself, virtually invisible to the participants and the surrounding culture. Because normative, naturalized, and thus expected everywhere, these relations do not present sites for the inscription of particular cultural significance. Confronted with unfamiliar patterns of intimacy between men, patterns that do not conform to heteronormative expectations and categories of experience, the outside observer may apply invented classifications, such as "homosocial" or "homoerotic." But the forms of intimacy and desire that pattern relations between men in Israel, forms of intimacy so strikingly unfamiliar to the outside observer, are not "problematized" in Israeli society, in Foucault's sense, and thus simply are, without serving as bearers of significance, without being in any way remarkable.
At this point in my image-based research, I have downloaded thousands of photographs and videos from IDF Facebook networks and stamped them with the soldier’s name, his hometown and the date he posted the image to his lifestream. I’ve systematically catalogued these images by cultural pattern, by geographic region and by date of posting. To present each of these patterns visually, I am producing a series of collage panels that juxtaposes stamped images from a discernible cultural pattern, moving geographically region by region, from north to south --"From Dan to Be'ersheba"--and chronologically from 2005-2016. Video clips are accessed by scanning QR codes integrated into the collage. This is a work in progress, and this gallery consists merely in a sneak preview of the material I am working with.
To access videos, scan the QR Code using any free QR Reader/Scanner app on your smartphone.
Mixed media collage (money, ink, 19th-century edition of Fichte's Sittenlehre) 11"x14", 2009
