Challenge

How can images taken by photographers from Israel and Palestine create a new space where political leaders of both countries would be able to reexamine the occupation and its history?

Journey

Ariella Azoulay, a renowned Israeli author, filmmaker and visual culture theorist, challenges the viewer to identify occupation in its different forms through an unflinching look into the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. Her exhibition “Act of State – 40 Years of Palestine Occupation” offers dual perspectives with photographs detailing lands from times of war to conquest and administration to ambivalence. The photography archive contained around 700 photographs taken by over 80 different photographers from Israel and Palestine.

We envisioned and brought the exhibition to the Geneva-based United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) at the time of discussion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We worked with the Palestinian Ambassador to the United Nations, the United Nations’ Cultural Activities Committee and The Center of Photography Geneva (CPG) to ensure that the exhibition opening coincided with the HRC’s session on Israel and Palestine.

Impact

• The exhibition at the Human Right Council during discussions on Israel and Palestine, the first of its kind, presented photographs which were both political and historical. It left the viewer questioning what occupation means, whom it affects and why the terminology “occupation” has disappeared from the narrative it explores
• Photographs provided extraordinary visual testimony of the texture of Israel’s occupation of Palestine establishing a forty-year narrative of the painful aesthetics of destruction
• By coinciding with the HRC’s session on Israel and Palestine, the exhibition expanded the dialogue between diplomats, civil society organizations, and the local community in a public and inescapable way