Common Ground – Deconstructing Walls: A Palestinian Israeli dialogue

About the symposium

This symposium series presents an intervention of art and activism promoting dialogue and understanding within the diverse and sometimes divided Viennese society and beyond, regarding Palestine and Israel.

In the wake of deepening divisions, dehumanization, and violence, from the ethnic cleansing in 1947, throughout the years of occupation, and reciprocal violence culminating in the Hamas massacre on October 7th and the genocide in Gaza. By engaging experts, activists, artists, and representatives from human rights and civil society organizations across the region and Europe, this series of events explores how accountability and reconciliation might be pursued in the context of a prevailing power imbalance and continued structural oppression.

The third event in the series, Narrative & Recognition, focuses on who is seen, who is heard, and whose stories are allowed to shape public understanding. It examines how dominant Israeli narratives systematically marginalize Palestinian lived experiences, deny historical and ongoing injustices, and normalize policies of displacement, occupation, and mass violence. The event addresses how this imbalance of recognition fuels continued harm, silences accountability, and blocks meaningful political and social change.

Drawing on the work and perspectives of experts and artists, the symposium brings together practitioners whose fields are directly implicated in the production and contestation of narratives; Through legal analysis, artistic practice, and critical reflection, the speakers will examine how Palestinian voices are structurally excluded through institutional frameworks, juridical regimes and cultural representation. 

Reclaiming narrative space is approached not as symbolic recognition, but as a necessary condition of accountability, political responsibility, and any future grounded in justice rather than denial.

Exhibitions

The Mediated Eye: The Lens is a Border | Rawan Joulani, Laila Abd Elrazaq, and Yara Mahajneh. Curator: Rula Khoury

In the contemporary Palestinian landscape, the act of "seeing" is never neutral. For artists Rawan Joulani, Laila Abd Elrazaq, and Yara Mahajneh, the video lens serves as both a shield and a scalpel, dissecting the layers of a reality defined by constant monitoring and the restriction of speech. Though their aesthetic approaches diverge, they are united by an urgent inquiry into how power structures—both physical and digital—attempt to dominate the Palestinian body and narrative.

Rawan Joulani’s Changes in the Distance utilizes a high-altitude, observational lens to deconstruct the fragmented topography of Jerusalem. By zooming in on the layered complexities of Shuafat and its surroundings, she transforms the window into a border, capturing a "panoptic" view of social and political stratification without direct interaction. Her camera documents the landscape as a witness to an architecture of separation.

Shifting from the physical to the digital, Laila Abd Elrazaq employs biting satire to confront the modern mechanisms of erasure. Through the lens of 1980s infomercials and sarcastic tutorials, she exposes the absurdity of SLAPP-suits and social media censorship. Her work highlights how technology, once promised as a tool for liberation, is repurposed by the state to police patriotism and limit the human right to free expression.

Yara Mahajneh grounds these systemic critiques in the visceral and the personal. Drawing from the traumatic reality of an interrogation room, her surrealist journey depicts a distorted world where identity is at risk of total erasure.

Together, these works reveal a shared resistance. By satirizing the "infomercial" of state power, observing the "layers" of occupied space, and surrealizing the trauma of the "interrogation," these artists reclaim the power of the gaze in an age of all-encompassing surveillance.

Curated by Rula Khoury

In The Face Of #2 | Rafat Zrieq

Zrieq, an Art Photographer, is a Palestinian Arab citizen of Israel, born in Nazareth in 1970.His life and work are shaped by the tensions of belonging—between identities, languages, histories.

Trained as a photographer at Camera Obscura College of Arts in Tel Aviv, and later in art and education at Oranim College, Zrieq has spent decades navigating the space between presence and marginalization.

His professional journey began in documentary photography, working alongside journalist Amira Hass at Haaretz, where he bore witness to the intersections of Palestinian and Israeli realities. He later became a photography educator at the Nazareth School of Film and served as director and jury member for local photography initiatives, believing that art must remain grounded in community.

Zrieq’s biography is marked by a continuous search for dialogue—not only between cultures, but between individuals. As a Palestinian living within Israeli society, he moves carefully between roles: observer, listener, artist, and citizen. He is drawn to those who live at the edges—Holocaust survivors, Bedouin children, the displaced, the overlooked—not out of voyeurism, but from an ethical commitment to recognition.

Through education, exhibitions, and activism, Zrieq’s path is rooted in the possibility of shared space. Not a space of agreement, but of acknowledgment. His life’s work insists: true listening begins when we recognize not only the pain of the other, but allow our own pain to be seen in return.

Curator Dr. Eli Bruderman

Dr. Bruderman is a philosopher, cultural researcher, and independent curator. Formerly Chief Curator at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, he currently teaches at Oranim College and curates exhibitions highlighting emerging artistic voices. His research spans aesthetics, ethics, and the cultural implications of artificial intelligence. He has published extensively, including two books: The Beauty of Consumerism (2017) and Joe on a Cloud (2023).

I Wish To Die In My Bed אני רוצה למות במיטתי | Inbal Volpo

Multidisciplinary artist. The work of Inbal Volpo emerges from a life shaped within a politically charged landscape, where art becomes a tool of resistance, testimony, and archive. Her practice seeks to mediate an inner reality, one structured around the sanctification of death and sacrifice, to an external society unfamiliar with the cultural and ideological logic in which she was raised.

Her childhood was formed in a West Bank settlement, within a Zionist community where the land itself became a religion and the border dissolved into a spectral sign: a line eroded and blurred under totalitarian structures. In this reality, she was educated into values of patriotism and nationalism, within a world where borders were never merely geographical but also psychic, symbolic and elusive. Out of this experience, her work develops an inquiry into the tension between finitude and its absence, between presence and erasure.

Within this language, art becomes a space of resistance and testimony. She employs the visual image not as ornament or distraction, but as a means of exposing what is being concealed: the mechanisms of control, the politicization of daily life, the histories that are written and erased simultaneously.

The photographs, objects, and fragments she gathers are haunted by a quiet estrangement. What should feel intimate, domestic, and safe instead returns with a shadow, familiar yet unsettled, like a home that has learned to betray its own walls. Each image carries the double weight of presence and absence: it holds a moment, yet it whispers of its loss. The archive too, in its promise to preserve, reveals the gaps and silences it cannot contain. In this interplay, the ordinary becomes uncanny, a space where memory flickers, where the known and the unknown collapse into one another.

At the same time, her work touches on moments of expansion before what cannot be represented, experiences where reality opens onto something beyond comprehension and control, where terror and beauty intertwine. The spaces she constructs resist a single line or center; instead, they unfold as multiplicity, in constant becoming, refusing to close into a singular form. In doing so, they create an alternative to hierarchical political structures, a space in which movement and dispersion are conditions of existence.

Through all of this, Inbal Volpo’s work is not only a personal testimony but also a call to re-examine notions of borders, memory, and belonging. Her practice situates art as a critical space that rearticulates the entanglement of the personal and the political, of the landscape she grew up in and the gaze of those encountering it from the outside.

Das 12 Uhr Blatt erasure | Yoav Hainebach

This work is materially made from issues of a Nazi propaganda newspaper printed between 1933 and 1945. My great-grandfather Franz Stern owned Das 12 Uhr Blatt when it was stolen by Nazis who cited the policy of Gleichschaltung (coordination) to enforce editorial control by banning Jews from owning or participating in press or journalism. Das 12 Uhr Blatt was the second largest daily newspaper distributed in Berlin. Stern’s partner, Walter Steinthal, was a theater critic, and their paper focused on cultural life in the city. The Nazis seized editorial control as soon as elected in March 1933 — one of their first moves, really. Their new minister of propaganda, Goebbels, thoroughly understood the powerful grip that news has on public opinion and empathy. They sought unilateral power to tell a story, their story, and ensure it is the only story. So, I collect issues of Das 12 Uhr Blatt printed before and after the take-over, which has proven to be a strangely easy thing to do. Today, you can find Nazi-era issues of this newspaper sold online as souvenirs. People continue to profit off of trading these products from a stolen business, 90 years after its wrongful seizure. My rationale for participating in this marketplace is straightforward: I convert these issues into pulp and end this cycle of profiting off of (and also fetishizing) what Nazis stole from my family. I created the pulp for this work so it is re-usable, re-combinant. This presented work will become pulp again and take a new form each time it is exhibited. This series will not culminate into discrete objects of commodity for any marketplace, but instead exist as an ongoing, shifting archive of violent reclamation and re-contexualization. There are many debates in Jewish academia whether or not to show, hide, destroy, or contextualize evidence of Nazi crimes, especially of the Holocaust itself. What begins as educational in intention can tip toward feeding fetishization or developing numbness to tragedy — Can any image or object possibly capture the gravity of that tragedy wholly? Is showing historical propaganda dangerous? What is worth keeping a record of? What is worth erasing? When do you show, hide, destroy or contextualize? Here, I chose contextualization. I chose to remove these issues of Das 12 Uhr Blatt from the free-market and root them in a new, critical context. I destroyed their original value, while retaining their materiality. Obliterating these issues into pulp, to generate blank pages, is an act of violence. Erasure is always an act of violence, and the erasure of a people is always accompanied by the erasure of their voices and stories. This symbolic act of violence I committed stands not only as criticism of a Nazi-era crime and the people still profiting from it, but also of today’s erasure within journalism. For many, journalism is ideally objective, or at least they idealistically trust they’ll recognize when it is not being objective. However, journalism is never an objective field, just as photography is never an objective medium — both are intrinsically born of their creator’s perspective. Personal framings, opinions, agendas, and biases are a baked into every single article, photograph, blog, and news outlet. Whether a corner newsstand in the 1930s, or an aggregate news app in 2020s, which outlets and stories are missing are just as important as which are present. In every story, the words not included are just as important as the ones that are. Every propaganda piece holds loud lies and silenced truths. Growing up in Israel as a Jewish person means being raised by and immersed in the Zionist narrative. The media’s role is huge: it creates an alternative reality so enveloping that people can no longer look beyond it without immediate distrust. Palestinians’ dehumanization did not start on Oct 7th, it was always present. However, since Oct 7th, Israeli journalism has fully become regime-aligned media. It openly serves as a propaganda tool to whitewash despicable crimes and justify a live genocide, marketed as self defense. While witnessing the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and the violent, Jewish-supremacist occupation of Palestine, a contradictory story instead emerges — a singular story, a dominating story, an Israeli story. Once again, a state under ethno-religious-nationalism seeks to be the only story. 

Yoav Hainebach is a visual artist based in Berlin since 2020, a return enabled by historical justice and family origin. Hainebach was born in Tel Aviv, and has lived, studied, and worked in Beijing, New York and Boston. Hainebach works on, with, and in paper, using painting, printmaking, drawing and paper-making to play with the space between reference and its visual abstraction. Their work is often self-reflective of the material itself and poses questions of time-linearity, of erasure as creation, and of chance.

Speakers

Configurations of Identity in Contemporary Palestinian Art | Rula Khoury

This lecture/talk explores how modern Palestinian artists assemble the fragments of history, memory, and geography to define themselves today. By examining different approaches to this subject—we analyze how "Configurations of Identity" are shaped, challenging traditional narratives and transforming the experience of displacement into a powerful, evolving visual language.

Rula Khoury is an art curator, historian, and critic, currently based in Haifa. She holds a Master’s degree in Art History from the University of Haifa and a second Master’s in Writing Art Criticism from the School of Visual Arts, New York.

Khoury served as General Director of the Arab Culture Association in Haifa (2020) and, prior to that, as Artistic Director of the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah (2014). In 2014, as part of the Qalandiya International Biennale, she curated the Manam exhibition in Haifa and Mapping Procession, a street-based happening in Ramallah. She was also one of the curators of the Autonomous Biennale (2023, 2025).

Her art criticism has been published in various international magazines, including AWARE, Tohu Magazine, and Tribe Photo Magazine. She has also published two children’s books, one of them in collaboration with the Barjeel Foundation. In addition, Khoury has taught in higher education institutions, offering courses on the history of Palestinian art and the fundamentals of art history.

Her latest project is the establishment of a new art gallery in Jaffa, Al-Mathaneh.

Uncomfortable History: hidden crimes, archives and civic action | Lior Yavne

Lior Yavne is the founder and Executive Director of the Akevot Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research, a human rights–oriented archival research institute based in Haifa, Israel. He has a long history in human rights work, including roles as Director of Research at the Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din and Director of Communications at B’Tselem.

Akevot Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research was founded in 2014 in recognition of the unique role archives can play in fostering fact-based public discourse and supporting the work of human rights defenders. The Institute works to transform archives into tools for change by researching and exposing mechanisms, policies, and events - including crimes committed during the Nakba and in the decades that followed, that have contributed to the perpetuation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Akevot locates, digitizes, and catalogues a wide range of archival documentation related to the history of Palestine-Israel, and makes these records accessible for litigation, research, and advocacy by human rights organizations and civil society groups. It also campaigns to expand public access to government archives in order to promote transparency, accountability, and freedom of information.

Can We Find Common Ground? Exploring Mutual Recognition After Gaza | Dr. Rawia Aburabia

Dr. Rawia Aburabia is a senior lecturer at Sapir Academic College’s School of Law and a research fellow at the Center for Applied Research on Risks to Democracy (CARRD) at Tel Aviv University, where she co-founded a research lab on Mutual Recognition in Israel/Palestine. Additionally, she is a research fellow at Shemesh Center for Partnership-Based Peace Research.  Her research focuses on critical and feminist legal analyses, emphasizing the intersections of family law, constitutional law, gender, minorities, and human rights in Israel/Palestine.  Aburabia has extensive experience in international human rights law and public law. She worked at the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), engaging in litigation before the Supreme Court and participating in international forums such as the United Nations and the European Parliament, focusing on indigenous peoples and minority rights. She was part of the expert team that contributed to the UN’s recognition of the Bedouin Arab community as an indigenous group

The Politics of Hope in Israel–Palestine: From Domination to Partnership-Based Peace | Dr. Limor Yehuda

Founding Director, Shemesh Center for Partnership-Based Peace Research and Senior Research Fellow, the Van Leer Jerusalem institute.

Lecturer, the Faculty of Law, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Dr. Limor Yehuda is the founding director of The Shemesh Center for Partnership-Based Peace Research and a Senior Research Fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. Her research focuses on peacebuilding and international law. She is the author of Collective Equality: Democracy and Human Rights in Ethno-National Conflicts (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

Dr. Yehuda previously clerked for President Aharon Barak at the Supreme Court of Israel, practiced as a human rights lawyer, and led the Human Rights in the Occupied Territories Department at the Association for Civil Rights in Israel. She is one of the founders of A Land for All and serves on its joint board.

Common Ground- Deconstructing Walls is a project by OneState Embassy Art Collective

And is funded by SHIFT, a funding program of the City of Vienna for alternative, artistic practices in decentralized cultural work.

27–28 February 2026

Atelierhaus der Akademie der Bildenden Künste

Lehargasse 6–8, 1060 Vienna