In 2008, Cuban artist Tania Bruguera presented the work Tatlin’s Whisper #5 at Tate Modern. During the performance, two mounted police officers in uniform entered the exhibition space; one riding a white horse and the other a black horse. The mounted officers patrolled the space, directing and controlling the audience using crowd-control techniques commonly used at large public events or during riots and disturbances. Their actions included closing the gallery entrances, pushing the audience forward through lateral movements of the horses, manipulating the crowd into a single group and surrounding it to tighten the formation, confronting viewers head-on with the horses, and splitting the audience into two separate groups[1].

These forms of control acquire different meanings depending on the context in which they appear. By relocating such actions into the Tate’s museum space, the work exposed different aspects of the bodily choreographies that take place within human societies in relation to systems of power and control. In this way, the work reflected the complex relationships between agents of authority and those subjected to them, while enabling a critical examination of bodily choreographies.

The human body constantly appears within choreographies structured by mechanisms of law and governance: standing at a traffic light, recoiling in fear from a barrier painted red, and so forth. The body remembers policing mechanisms; it functions as a container into which the realities surrounding us are poured, along with the logics through which those realities are constructed.

Many artworks stage an encounter between the artist’s conceptual world and the environment in which they operate. In this study, I seek to examine the different modes through which Israeli artists express, in their works, the connection between the body as a remembering mechanism and the reality of the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

In 1948, the State of Israel was established through a unilateral declaration and with the approval of the United Nations, following prolonged conflicts and violent attacks between the Jewish people and the Palestinian people living in the land. According to the UN Partition Plan, the territory was divided between the two, and in 1967, following the Six-Day War or/and al-Naksa[2], the border line known as the Green Line was defined. Since then, Israeli military rule and Apartheid regime has existed in most of the Palestinian territories in the West Bank. The Israeli High Court of Justice defined the Israeli rule in the area as follows: “Judea and Samaria are held by Israel through military occupation or belligerent occupation. A military government has been established in the area, headed by a military commander”[3].

Within the framework of the Oslo Accords, signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) between 1993 and 1995, the Palestinian Authority was established as the governing body of Palestine. It received responsibility for the administration of Palestinian civilian life from the Israeli military government. The West Bank was divided into three categories, each representing different systems of governance and authority: Area A, under full Palestinian civil and security control; Area B, under Palestinian civil control and Israeli security control; and Area C, under full Israeli control.

In addition to the territories of the West Bank, there are other disputed territories: East Jerusalem, annexed by Israel in 1967, and the Gaza Strip, which has functioned as an independent entity under Hamas rule since the 2005 “Disengagement Plan,” during which Israeli settlements were evacuated from Gaza.

These processes, among many others, produced the reality of the Israeli occupation and genocide, in which the State of Israel exercises military and political control over Palestinian territories and operates mechanisms of force and coercion. Various Israeli artists engage in dialogue with Israel as an ‘occupying body’, engaing with their own bodies as a metaphor for the body of the state. I seek to examine the ways in which the body, in all its manifestations, becomes a site of metaphorical occurrence. The study explores what the body signifies within political reality and how it is represented as a vessel that retains the memory of governing mechanisms.

The artworks discussed relate to Israeli artists working across different years, media, and locations. The perspective of these artists emerges from an Israeli identity. The body represented in the works shifts between the artist’s own body, the Israeli body, the Palestinian body, and the nation conceived as a body[4].

The military is founded upon a collective principle of erasing individuality and elevating the state or nation above the needs of the individual[5]. War leaves traces upon the body: coercion imposed on both combatant and civilian bodies; trauma, mutilation, and the destruction of flesh. Yet within its media representation exists a distancing from the body. The body becomes absent from the imagination of war; war centers on the destruction of the private body, while sanitized and disembodied warfare appears as a byproduct of collective repression, an expression of the belief that what remains unseen will eventually disappear.

After 1967, voices opposing the Israeli occupation became increasingly prominent, and the term “occupation” itself grew more widespread. In this context, the figure of the soldier after 1967 acquires different meanings: no longer merely a symbol of war or the military, but also a symbol of crossing borders and occupying land and population. And yet masculine potency transformed into national potency, and of the seduction and power accompanying war, the fighter and the weapon become agents of ‘sexy occupation’ made it not only admayered but seductive; the ideal body becomes the occupying body.

This raises the question: what is the relationship between war and occupation? Occupation is one possible outcome of war. It is a process of crossing borders and, in a certain sense, a challenge to law itself. The exhibition The Eyes of the State (1998), curated by Ellen Ginton at Tel Aviv Museum of Art, dealt with the breaking of boundaries, particularly the border known as the Green Line. In the exhibition catalogue, Ginton describes war and occupation as experiences of crossing legal, physical, psychological, and behavioral boundaries. She presents border crossing as an act of transgressing the law. A semantic reinforcement of this idea appears in the Book of Jeremiah, where the words for “border” and “law” converge in meaning: “[…] I placed the sand as a boundary for the sea, an eternal law it cannot cross.”[6]

 

 

 

The fascination with death forms part of the roots of Zionism[7].

One main representation of  the Intifada (two major Palestinian uprisings against Israeli rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip) in israeli media was ablindfolded palestinian detainees. A site of forced blindness, violence imposed upon the gaze itself. Blindfolding abolishes the ability to resist and diminishes the detainee’s humanity. The ability to see is also the ability to return the gaze- and recognize yourself and the other.

The occupation of territory grants power to the occupier. The symbolic use of power through covering the eyes of a Palestinian detainee is significant in the form of violence it demonstrates. In the relationship between occupation and the body, what is presented is an experience of hostile takeover and the negation of the body as a site of protection, deprived of one of the senses necessary for survival and security. The experience of occupation becomes analogous to castration, like the bodily mutilation implied in forced blindness. The distortion of the body is both personal and social; the body, as a symbol of the national body, is distorted and transformed through occupation.

The mechanisms of occupation, through their dual qualities of containing and rejecting the occupied, deform both occupier and occupied. Within the symbiotic relationship created between occupied and occupier, all participating bodies are harmed and marked.

In its many manifestations, the body becomes a field of tensions between different mechanisms of power. The wounded or wounding body is reshaped by political reality. One might say that in the encounter between body and occupation, the body remains injured and a prisoner of war on both sides of the divide. Blindness becomes a symbol both of repression and of the suppression of resistance. One is blind folded by its obtainer the other in blinded by his own doing[8].

The body itself becomes a material; it embodies mechanisms of governance and power and serves as a living archive of acts of war.

Occupation contains within it a dimension of incorporation, even embodiment. Embodiment within the body is an experience of inclusion, but also of rejection and expulsion- a deeply conflicted experience unfolding within bodily space. Likewise, the incorporation of occupied territory is both inclusion and rejection: the occupied part is rejected because of its foreignness, it it the ‘face of an enemy’, and its aspiration for independence, while at the same time the occupying mechanism must legally and militarily contain it.

Arkadi Zaides (1979) is an artist, dancer, and choreographer whose works examine the relationship between body and reality, treating the body as a vessel that absorbs and internalizes the political conditions surrounding it. In his work Archive (2014), the body appears as a container- not only of the individual self, but also of all the materials of life it encounters According to Zaides, “the conflict exists within each of us.” His works investigate the effects of sociopolitical reality upon the body.

In the piece, excerpts from the Camera Project of the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem are projected onto two large screens. In the project, video cameras were distributed to Palestinians in the occupied territories in order to document violations of their human rights. The videos depict situations of conflict involving official and unofficial mechanisms of power, including Israeli soldiers. One screen projects the footage itself, while the other displays details about the recordings, where and when they were filmed, and so forth.

Standing alone before the screens, Zaides spends the performance imitating the bodily movements and choreographies that appear in the videos. Within the footage exists a dialogue between the Palestinians behind the camera- physically absent, yet determining the viewpoint and direction of the gaze- and the Israeli terrorists being documented.

At the beginning of the performance, Zaides declares: “I am Israeli, and those shown here are Israeli.”[9] From the outset, he places himself within the same population as those filmed, performing a double act of embodiment: embodying the Israeli within an Israeli body through estrangement.

The perspective is not that of the ruling side, but of the ruled. The act of filming is itself an act of power- it controls the narrative. In relation to the body and occupation, the viewpoint of this work is unique. It is a mixed perspective: the Palestinian narrative is present, yet so too is the bodily embodiment of that perspective through an Israeli dancer. The bodily choreography becomes a trilogue between the Israeli being filmed, the Palestinian filming, and the dancer; three bodies functioning as conduits for the work.

Zaides stands alone on stage, using his body to examine the bodies of Israelis as captured on camera, focusing on physical reactions in situations of confrontation. The potential for violence embedded within every individual body. The choreographic practice is based on imitation, as Zaides’ body becomes a living archive. Through mimicking the movements from the videos, he constructs a choreographic lexicon, functioning simultaneously as instrument and mediator. Throughout the work, we witness memory and recollection operating through his body, alongside a bodily representation of force and systems of power.

At a later stage in the piece, the screens go dark while Zaides continues the choreography. In this way, the body’s memory becomes materially present, an echo. We witness the unconscious transmission of bodily action: even after the immediate danger has disappeared and no actual confrontation remains, the body remembers and continues to operate according to the physical memory inscribed within it.

The act of imitation is itself an act of appropriation, containing the same duality present in military occupation- the simultaneous dynamics of inclusion and rejection. Imitation reenacts the action while also creating distance from it. This distance enables critique and condemnation; imitation thus becomes both identification and separation.

In an essay about the work, Dana Shalev notes that “the soldier stands midway between the dancer and the settler.” Military service exists for many Israelis as a physical, bodily memory. Soldiers perform a different choreography from unofficial agents of power, and that choreography is inscribed within the Israeli viewer’s body. When Zaides imitates both soldier and settler, he blurs the boundaries between different holders of power, or at least raises questions about the distinctions between them.

Zaides’ work functions as an image of the process undergone by an occupying society. Society internalizes militarized behaviors; no real separation remains between military and civilian spheres. Practices of force and surveillance become normalized within civilian life and embodied by every individual. Violence persists even after the violent act itself has ended.

The occupation of another is not only war; it is simultaneously an act of inclusion and rejection- it contains both attraction and repulsion.[10]

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