Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience, the cumulative offering by more than a century and a half’s worth of those professional, specialized tourists known as journalists. Wars are now also living room sights and sounds.
Information about what is happening elsewhere, called ‘news’, features conflict and violence…to which the response is compassion, or indignation, or titillation, or approval, as each misery heaves into view.
The photographer’s intentions do not determine the meaning of the photograph, which will have its own career, blown by the whims and loyalties of the diverse communities that have used it.
Making suffering loom larger, by globalizing it, may spur people to feel they ought to ‘care’ more. It also invites them to feel that the sufferings and misfortunes are too vast, too irrevocable, too epic to be much changed by any local political intervention.
Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag (2003)
Since 1948, Palestine has been fighting the ascendency of the hegemonic narratives. These narratives can be contradictory sometimes. These binary-narratives either victimize or demonize the people leading to uprising polarization, and the palestinian became either animals needed to be fought against, as Yoav Gallant said, or became an abstract death tolls because of the news reports. These narratives skip the long complex history and repress any speculation that presents a different future to push us, the public, into this closed circle of inevitable present.
While asking ourselves who does benefit from this continuation of the status quo? And what is to be done? The thematic framework of the program is counter narratives and speculation on Palestine that engages with history through the lens of historical materialism, questions the present and its inevitability, and speculates new futures that challenge the hegemonic colonial fiction.
Design Scope: Art Direction, Poster Design by A'amer
