ما تبقّى מָה שֶׁנּוֹתַר What Remains

A Group Exhibition 

The exhibition brings together photographic and lens-based practices that engage with the traces left by violence, displacement, rupture, and survival.

Rather than offering direct representation, the works inhabit the terrain of aftermath: fragments, absences, residues, and lingering presences. They attend to what persists within spaces, bodies, materials, and landscapes shaped through enduring conditions of violence and dispossession. In doing so, the exhibition considers photography not only as a medium of documentation, but as a site of testimony, memory, and unresolved histories.

What Remains reflects on the tensions between visibility and erasure, silence and witnessing, accountability and denial. The exhibition does not seek closure or resolution. Instead, it opens a space for reflection on how histories continue to inhabit the present, and on the fragile, uncertain conditions through which reconciliation may, or may not, be imagined.

Alexander Cocotas

The Writing on the Wall

2024,2025

These photos are part of an ongoing series in Berlin, inspired by a visual motif I noticed on the walls of the city: the word “Gaza” painted over and yet still faintly visible beneath the attempted concealment. After October 7th, any demonstration in Berlin thought to be sympathetic to Palestinians was violently suppressed by the police, who admitted in court that they had also covered up graffiti about the conflict on the city’s walls, even if it simply said “Gaza.” This was especially true in Neukölln, where I have lived for ten years, and which is also home to the largest Palestinian diaspora in Europe. As the images demonstrate, however, these walls have retained a memory of what the government would prefer to be unspoken, a potent symbol of resilience against state censorship.

Artist bio: Alex Cocotas is an artist and writer living in Berlin. He is originally from California, where his grandparents arrived as refugees from Nazi Germany, and he previously lived in Israel for several years. His journalism, criticism, and essays have appeared in publications like The London Review of Books, The Guardian, The Paris Review, Cabinet Magazine, and The Baffler, among others. He staged his first solo exhibit of photography in 2024; his first play, Die Hölle ist Leer, premiered in 2025; he recently finished his second novel, and is currently at work on a nonfiction book about Germany’s memory culture. He initiated, wrote, and organzied the “Open Letter of Jewish Intellectuals in Germany: Freedom for the One Who Think Differently,” which appeared in taz in Germany and n+1 in English on October 23rd, 2023. 

Tamir Hadar

Untitled (Pomegranate)

2025

analog photograph 

Tamir Hadar's practice examines the impact of war and religion on society and the civilian psyche. Drawing on biblical and Kabbalistic texts, he explores how ancient narratives shape contemporary realities.  Untitled (pomegranate) depicts a decaying pomegranate, traditionally a Jewish symbol of fertility and royalty. By eroding the fruit's clarity into an unsettling, ambiguous form, the work critiques the perceived moral and social disintegration within Israeli-Jewish society. the image plays on the Hebrew word rimon (רימון), which means both "pomegranate" and "hand grenade." By collapsing the boundary between a symbol of life and an instrument of war, the photograph illustrates how tradition and belief systems can be weaponized and corrupted over time.

Inbal Volpo & Rafat Zrieq

A series of black-and-white photographs created by a Jewish Israeli artist and a Palestinian artist who is a citizen of Israel presents two complementary perspectives on a charged landscape. It is a space in which the idea of home becomes unstable: the boundaries between inside and outside, protection and exposure, are not fixed but continually shifting.

Within this space, multiple layers of time coexist simultaneously. Construction and destruction are not separate events, but parallel conditions of existence.

Rather than offering a single, coherent narrative, the works place different modes of observing the same geographic terrain side by side. Their juxtaposition does not seek reconciliation or unity; instead, it sustains the tension of a landscape that refuses to settle, remaining in a continuous state of transformation, loss, and replacement.

The result is a space that offers no stable point of reference. It bears the traces of displacement and loss alongside an ongoing effort to build and endure, without resolving the tension between the two.

Taken as a whole, the series presents a landscape that is at once personal and political, where vulnerability is evident not only in the structures themselves but also in the growing sense that place can no longer guarantee protection for those who inhabit it.

Rafat Zreiq, PhotographerInbal Volpo, Multidisciplinary Artist

Members of the Palestinian–Israeli art collective OneState Embassy Art Collective.

Shachaf Polakow

Palestine exists constantly in a temporal state of both disappearance and existence at the same time. What began in 1948 has never stopped: the ongoing land theft driven by Israeli colonial ambitions. At the same time, Palestinians continue to resist this colonial dispossession.

This photo is from the village of Ni‘lin in the West Bank. It was taken during a period when the village protested and resisted the construction of the Israeli apartheid wall.

Trained initially in photo documentary, my practice now spans photography and experimental new media. Through wandering and close observation, I investigate the layered histories of places, people, and materials, seeking new ways of relating to our surroundings from communities and damaged landscapes to overlooked objects and sounds. I see art as a space for connection, imagination, and hope, even when that hope emerges through grief and loss. The process of making art, as much as its outcomes, allows us to rethink how we might envision a more just and livable future.

My work is rooted in a critical, politically engaged approach shaped by years of collective and community-based practice, including my involvement with Activestills. Collaborations with Palestinian communities, the Tohono O’odham Nation, South African farmworkers, and others have taught me that hope is not abstract but lived through small, shared acts. In recent years, my focus has turned to the human environment relationships amid the global ecological crisis, responding to large-scale impacts such as wildfires, extractive industries, and water use, while also attending to intimate, localized traces. Using photography alongside sound, video, 3D scanning, and aerial imagery, I aim to create immersive works that invite contemplation, curiosity, and the possibility of imagining alternative futures.    

Noa Perez

נווה שלום, واحة السلام، Neve Shalom

2025

(from the project Under the Same Sky)

Neve Shalom is a cooperative village in Israel founded jointly by Jewish and Palestinian citizens, created as a place for coexistence, dialogue, and shared community life.

ילדי אל־רשאידה, أطفال الرشايدة، Children of Arab al-Rashaida

2025

Two girls playing behind a sheet, Arab al-Rashaida. This photograph is part of an ongoing project documenting the Al-Rashaida Bedouin tribe in the Judean Desert as they gradually move away from traditional nomadic life and adapt to the modern world, while highlighting their attempt to preserve a sense of freedom in the desert despite increasing restrictions imposed by Israeli politics of separation.

Noa Perez is a Jerusalem-based photographer and a photography student at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. Her work focuses on portraiture and street  photography, engaging with communities and questions of identity. She has exhibited in Israel and internationally and recently published her first photobook, Under the Same Sky.

sharon levy

Sukkah (hut) Lookout

2025

If this is a memorial sukkah (hut), why is it located on a hill so close to al-Farasiya community? Why does it seek to be seen, and not only to see?

In the northern Jordan Valley, a sukkah was built by settlers. In a recurring pattern, huts are erected; afterwards, Israeli flags are added. At night, metal stakes sprout and fences take shape. Barbed wire appears, and a security camera pops up. The fences enclose and seal the community, while the sukkah serves as a close-range lookout, a watchtower, sustaining the violent power relations between settlers, who live above the law, and Palestinians, who live in fear and injustice beneath the eye of the law. The camera atop the sukkah looms over the community, documenting it 24/7, i.e. the time of departure of shepherds and their flock to the pasture and of their return.

In this way, the sukkah reinforces the violence. The settlers use their privileges, backed by authorities, and from this elevated position they look down onto the valley, seeking moments that allow friction. Palestinians in the valley cannot retaliate, because self-defense may be perceived by the settlers, and by those who back them - as an attack.

These days when the magnitude of settler violence increases, their outposts continue emerging, Israeli flags wave from many hilltops, and the Arabic language is erased from road signs - the huts underscore the growing inequality.

A sensitive human eye should not fail to perceive the imagery of occupation and ongoing harm inflicted on the other.

Sharon Levy, Landscape Architecture Student at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem; B.Sc. in Plant science, Landscape management and Ecology; Alumni of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies. 

One who seeks Peace and doesn’t turn her head, pretending she doesn’t see the Injustice.  

Yinon Avior Philipsohn

Off Guard

2026

Staged uniformed legs, underexposed inside a shuttered space. Bad situation in bad lighting, shot through glass. An emergency button goes unnoticed. "Soulagicon" is written on the plinth.

Yinon Avior Philipsohn was born in Tel Aviv in 1991. He lives and works in Copenhagen.

The exhibition takes place on June 20–21, 2026 at the Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien in Vienna, as part of the project Common Ground – Deconstructing Walls by OneState Embassy Art Collective and Standing Together Vienna. Hosted in Cooperation with ÖH.Dok der akbild, and is funded by SHIFT, a funding program of the City of Vienna for alternative, artistic practices in decentralized cultural work.