ROEE ROSEN

On the Gaza War Tattoos, 2024

Rather than actual tattoos, the Gaza War Tattoos are emulations rendered on bodies and photographed. The images add up to a hybrid skin-scape, which is fragmentary both formally, and in its approach to an almost impossible, unbearable topic. This current, devastating chapter in the violent conflict in Palestine Israel is echoed here in ways that veer erratically from open-ended cyphers (figurations of notions such as “witnessing,” “evidence,” “listening”), to echoing aspects of the destruction meted in Gaza (the burning of hospitals and schools), to tackling of concrete events and places, as well as the often oxymoronic language of nationalistic and military terminology bracketing the events. To cite two examples: areas declared by Israel as safe zones became sites of massive bombardment and civil death, and the coinage total victory is reiterated ad-nauseam by the Israeli prime-minister as the goal of the war, a vacuous abstraction designed to perpetuate the war as never-ending (but also describing, an always-already manifold loss). An exceptional piece within the series, and its only purely-verbal design, is the poem The Dreadful Dreidel, which is composed exclusively from the names given by the Israeli army to its assaults on Gaza during the current century.

The series was commissioned by Steirischer Herbst (curators: Ekaterina Degot and David Riff). Creative team: photography: Goni Riskin, digital editing: Galit Aloni and Irma Arieli, Production: Ahal Eden