ONESTATE Embassy Art Collective
OneState Embassy
Art Collective
OneState Embassy Art Collective is a conceptual artwork that transcends conventional ideas of the state. Its vision reimagines a world where boundaries are dissolved, and humanity exists as one, united by shared values of equality and belonging. Through its multidisciplinary projects and community initiatives, the collective imagines a utopian form of citizenship—one that surpasses traditional notions of geography, nationality, and race and embraces the principle that all people are global citizens with an equal right to exist.
Practicing Political Imagination
At the heart of the collective’s work lies the power of dreams. Its members envision a future where justice and equality are foundational, where divisions dissolve, and aspirations for unity replace discord.
Founded by Palestinian and Israeli artists, OneState Embassy emerged from a profound need to dream beyond the constraints of conflict and division that shape their shared homeland. This act of dreaming through art becomes a way to explore new worlds where imagination and creativity redraw the borders that politics and history have imposed.
While deeply rooted in the Israeli-Palestinian context, OneState Embassy's vision reaches far beyond it. The collective seeks to confront global structures of power and division, offering an egalitarian perspective that invites audiences to imagine an alternate future. In a time of intensifying fragmentation and rising walls, OneState Embassy calls on all of us to envision a world where physical, ideological, and emotional borders dissolve, replaced by a shared vision of peace, equity, and common humanity. Through their art, they encourage audiences to dream, to question governing systems, and to envision a future grounded in compassion, equality, and collective identity.
OneState Embassy Passport is a collective, performative artwork enacted in real time and space by the OneState Embassy Art Collectiv. Staged as a live diplomatic intervention, the work invites participants to receive a unique passport that subverts the logic of nation-states and instead proposes a civic, borderless identity rooted in shared humanity.
Each passport page features original contributions by artists from conflict and post-conflict zones, forming a plurality of responses to the structural violence of borders, inequality, and exclusion. Our intervention draws on the aesthetics of statecraft—documents, rituals, and authority only to subvert them. We imagine citizenship not as a mechanism of exclusion, but as a commitment to civil responsibility, mutual recognition, and universal equality.
As both a physical object and a political-aesthetic document, the passport becomes a site of embodied resistance. Through this live action, participants are invited to reconsider the notion of citizenship—not as a privilege reserved for the few, but as an ethical civic commitment to mutual recognition, shared responsibility, and universal equality. The passport becomes a tool for participation in a living archive of solidarity; one that refuses division and reimagines belonging beyond the nation.
The OneState Embassy Passport traverses the boundaries between the symbolic and the material, between performance and object. It offers a new space in which citizenship, art, and political imagination come together in an act of resistance and collective hope.
Artworks by: Armina Hatic, Barbara Sackl, Benjamin Ben Amotz, Daniele Mano-Bella, Deborah Lara Schaefer, Gianluca Capozzi, Heimo Zobernig, Inbal Volpo, Intizor Otaniyozova, Monika Kranich Pichler, Osama Zater, Oula Khatib, Petra Forman, Rafat Zrieq, Saad Al Ghefari, and Yonatan Auron Ophir.
LAMENT
JEWISH MUSEUM VIENNA COLLECTION
Photos by Caitlin Gura JMV
For nearly two years, Palestine and Israel have been engulfed in war. The full scale of destruction and loss is still unfolding, but the experience of mourning is tangible and deeply present. War is not only a political and social condition—it is also a personal and collective experience of grief and bereavement.
In both Jewish and Islamic traditions, mourning is a structured set of rituals and embodied gestures that frame and give presence to emotional responses to death and loss. It is not merely a private reaction, but a cultural practice that offers the dead a dignified farewell and the living a structured path toward healing and continuity. Expressions of mourning involve the suspension of routine, collective remembrance, and distinct physical elements—sitting or kneeling on the ground, covering the body—as well as vocal and verbal forms, such as lamentation.
Lamentation, as both a rhetorical and poetic act, employs repetition, invokes loss, and serves as a form of memorialization. It functions as a cultural mechanism that traverses the private and the public, linking individual sorrow to collective trauma. Through the body and the voice, grief is rendered visible, shared, and recognized, becoming part of the social fabric.
The sculptural work presents a kneeling figure, entirely covered in fabric—a visual gesture toward the embodied experience of grief and sorrow. This feminine form, burdened by loss, invites viewers to reconsider the relationship between body and mind, and the ways in which personal pain is entangled within broader social and historical frameworks during times of crisis.
The Audio installation features verses from the Book of Lamentations, read in Hebrew, Arabic, English, and German. This version departs from the biblical text, lamentation through a feminist, godless lens—centered not on divine judgment, but on human suffering and responsibility. Rather than seeking solace in myth or faith, the work grounds lamentation in human agency and accountability. Grief is not abstracted or universalized—it is specific, embodied, and political. It names the violence.
This framing is especially urgent in the face of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. The work insists that mourning is not separate from political responsibility. Through voice, presence, and the shared vulnerability of language, it challenges the hierarchies of remembrance and the conditions under which grief is allowed to be seen or heard.
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