Narrative & Recognition - Group Exhibition | Inbal Volpo | Rafat Zrieq | Yoav Hainebach

Curation OneState Embassy Art Collective

The exhibition brings together Israeli and Palestinian artists who examine the conditions under which histories gain authority, become contested, or are pushed to the margins. The gallery is approached as a site where narratives are not simply displayed but actively produced, a space in which images, archives, and personal histories participate in shaping what is accepted as truth in the public sphere.

At the core of the exhibition is an inquiry into ongoing power relations between Israel and Palestine and the political and social structures that shape the limits of discourse. It asks who is granted visibility and legitimacy, which stories come to define collective understanding, and which lived experiences remain excluded from dominant frameworks of meaning. Attention is directed toward the institutional and cultural mechanisms that regulate representation, knowledge, and memory, and toward the ways these mechanisms establish hierarchies of suffering, justice, and belonging.

The participating artists work within fields that are directly involved in the making and challenging of narratives. Their practices engage the archive, whether familial, national, or mediated, as a charged terrain where selection, omission, and interpretation construct collective memory. Personal narrative and individual history are not presented as private testimony alone, but as critical tools that reveal how broader ideologies are absorbed into everyday life and reproduced through it.

This exhibition unfolds at a moment marked by the genocide in Gaza, the ongoing displacement of Palestinian communities in the West Bank, expanding state and settler violence, and deep structural inequality embedded in law and governance. Within Israeli society, military service and civilian loss are framed as inevitable and necessary sacrifice, while Palestinian death and dispossession are frequently rendered abstract or justified in the language of security. In such a context, the struggle over narrative is neither abstract nor symbolic. The framing of events, the terminology that legitimizes force, and the images that circulate in media and political discourse shape the capacity to recognize harm and to assume responsibility. By linking the construction of narratives to the urgency of the present in Israel and Palestine, Narrative & Recognition insists that how reality is told determines how it is understood, and ultimately, how it is acted upon.

I Wish To Die In My Bed אֲנִי רוֹצָה לָמוּת בְּמִטָּתִי | Inbal Volpo

Mixed Media Object, 120 × 120 cm; Video, 00:59 min (loop). 2026

The work of Inbal Volpo, a Multidisciplinary artist, 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.

Within this language, art becomes a space of resistance and testimony. She employs the visual image 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.

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.

Muhammad and Naomi | Rafat Zrieq

Video & Audio Installation, 60 min. 2026

Two who are worlds. Two who are a historical assemblage of pain, struggle, survival and overcoming. Two who are a separate gaze. Facing one another, Muhammad and Naomi unfold their histories, one to the other. Out of the encounter, the deep gazes are turned from their individual interiority toward meeting, toward their becoming the Other the fellow-man the fellow woman.

Jean-Paul Sartre points out that only when a person experiences transgression, when he confronts in a real way commandment, disappointment and despair, when he faces the conflicting emotions toward the Other and the encounter of contradictory desires, does he become a whole human being.

The way to do this appears so simple, to speak. Yet this is not idle chatter, not the everyday speech of emptiness and triviality. Between Naomi and Muhammad there is none of this kind of speech, none of the daily vanity and hollow talk. Both are on a journey to discover the face of the Other and to discover the wholeness of their own being. They are in dialogue.

In dialogue for its own sake, the stance is one of being with the Other. There is a longing for the Other born of the recognition of his uniqueness and individuality, of the fact that he completes me and I complete him through difference and singularity, through his being Other. If the true desire is to discover the Other, to make room for him, to create freedom for him, and thus not to dominate his being or turn him into an object for one’s needs, those who enter into dialogue must impose upon themselves limitation, restraint and modesty. They must attempt to diminish themselves in the name of a humanity that relinquishes the presumption of being whole without the Other.

In dialogue, human beings of unique personality speak with one another. The partner in dialogue wishes to hear the voice of the Other and to receive the full contours of the face of the one he encounters.

Dialogue is a continuous effort to restore to human beings their faces, their world and their unique value.

In dialogue there is listening and there is silence. Naomi is silent in the presence of Muhammad’s words. Muhammad is silent in the presence of Naomi’s words. The effort is visible on their faces and in their body language. It is not always possible. At times suffering breaks through the texture of language and expression. Yet Muhammad and Naomi remain resolute in their journey, out of personal responsibility to discover the full face of the Other who stands before them.

In this listening and silence they become partners in discourse, each in his and her own time.

They undergo the profound experience of dialogue in which each participant lives the double and contradictory experience of sovereignty and passivity, of speech and attentive silence.

Naomi and Muhammad, Muhammad and Naomi, are the wheels that carry us as viewers along the path of dialogue in a world and in a region preoccupied only with speech, mostly with empty and idle words. They help us discover that the Other is a reality, a concrete history of pain and overcoming.

Muhammad and Naomi are the archetype of the Other for all who long to take upon themselves the painful and healing journey of dialogue for its own sake.

NOW

Listen to the cry of the woods, the woods that carry the horrors of histories that will not fade away. Listen to the whisper of the swirling voices of women who tell the tragic reality of the Gaza children obliterated by speech of hate and blind bombings.

Zrieq is a Palestinian Arab citizen of Israel, born in Nazareth in 1970, whose work is shaped by the tensions of belonging between identities, languages, and histories. Trained at Camera Obscura College of Arts in Tel Aviv and later at Oranim College, he began in documentary photography alongside Amira Hass at Haaretz, witnessing the intersections of Palestinian and Israeli realities. He later became a photography educator and cultural initiator in Nazareth, grounding his practice in community. Committed to dialogue and recognition, Zrieq moves between roles as artist, listener, and citizen, seeking shared space based not on agreement but on acknowledgment and the courage to face one another’s pain.

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).

Das 12 Uhr Blatt erasure | Yoav Hainebach

7 newspaper issues of handmade paper with silent video feed each unfolded issue: 44X61cm; video, 7 min (loop). 2026

This work is materially made from issues of a Nazi propaganda newspaper — Das 12 UHR Blatt. This daily paper was founded by my great-grandfather Franz Stern in 1919 in Berlin and was co-owned with his partner Walter Steinthal. It was the 2nd most distributed daily newspaper in Berlin and focused on arts and culture. However, in March 1933, the Nazis stole it from them for being a Jewish-owned business, and used it to instead run propaganda until 1945. While retaining the name of the paper to parasitize its existing readership, the Nazis changed the masthead font and other graphic elements. The paper continued to cover cultural life in Berlin, painting an ordinary picture of a thriving urban society, with the genocide nowhere to be found. They sought unilateral power to tell a story, their story, and ensure it is the only story.

Today, I collect issues of Das 12 Uhr Blatt printed before and after the take-over. Nazi-era issues of this newspaper are sold online as souvenirs, and so I convert these issues into pulp to end this cycle of profit and fetish. I engineered this pulp so it can continue to be re-pulped and take new forms. This series won’t generate new objects of commodity, but instead become an ongoing, shifting archive of a violent reclamation of some of what Nazis stole from my family. In this iteration, I designed a water-mark hole of the pre-takeover masthead font, which holds its presence as a literal absence in the paper. There are 7 recreations of the newspaper, in its pre-takeover size and format, for each day of the week.

There are many debates in Jewish academia whether or not to show, hide, destroy, or contextualize evidence of Nazi crimes. Here, I chose contextualization. I destroyed the propaganda’s original value, while retaining its materiality. Obliterating this propaganda’s legibility is an act of violence, as all erasure is. 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, but of contemporary crimes within journalism. Today, Israel (where my family fled to from Germany and I was therefore raised) forbids international journalists from entering Gaza, and it actively “neutralizes” the surviving ones living there. While we witness live-feeds of the genocide in Gaza and the violent occupation of Palestine, an ever-evolving story contradicts reality — an Israeli story. Once again, propaganda 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. Hainebach’s work is often self-reflective of the material itself and poses questions of time-linearity, of erasure as creation, and of chance.

Special Thanks: Gangolf Ulbricht (Paper Engineer),

Di Walsh (Assistant)

This exhibition forms part of the third symposium in the series Common Ground: Deconstructing Walls - Narrative and Recognition.

Common Ground- Deconstructing Walls is a project by OneState Embassy Art Collective, in cooperation with ÖH.Dok of akbild and is funded by SHIFT, a funding program of the City of Vienna for alternative, artistic practices in decentralized cultural work.

Opening event 27. Feb | 19:00

closes 1. March | 16:00

Atelierhaus der Akademie der Bildenden Künste

Lehargasse 6–8, 1060 Vienna