20/07/2025
Taha Afefe’s solo exhibition Annual Summary at Beit HaGefen risks being shut down. The reason for censorship: it humanizes Palestinian grief.
The attempt to shut this show down is about the erasure of the Palestinian experience from public space and the shrinking possibility for artists to speak honestly in a climate where empathy is policed.
Afefe’s body of work emerges in response to ongoing violence and geopolitical instability. It is a confrontation with pain not as history, but as an urgent presence.
At the heart of the installation are suspended wooden grid structures, which evoke the forms of window and door frames.
As metaphors, the windows and doors unsettle fixed boundaries, inviting a reconsideration of the tensions between interiority and exteriority, the personal and the collective, the self and the other.
That is precisely what has provoked outrage: not incitement, but the audacity to ask viewers to see through someone else’s window, to consider the grief and humanity of those excluded from the national narrative.
Precisely now, when public discourse is increasingly polarized, when empathy is framed as betrayal, and when narratives are flattened into binaries, there is an urgent need for dialogue. A dialogue that challenges the hierarchy of victimhood and invites us to see the full humanity of the other.
Text by Livia Tagliacozzo
Exhibition Curated by Barak Rubin
Image: Neither Troy My Home, Nor Masada My Time, 2025, Ink on paper, 150 × 1400 cm
.c.a .rubin
