POSITIONS

Pending soldiers during “Solid Rock” Operation in Gaza, July 2014. The soldiers inhabited public institutions, schools and hotels; these were transformed into housing for the soldiers during the operation. The cyclical and systematic typology of the images in the series demonstrates the stagnation, the fatigue of the situation. Déjà vu plays a role in the composition. The soldier lies on a mattress – the same mattress he laid on during previous conflicts between the Israelis and the Palestinians. The supine position and the heavy feeling is not felt by one, it's felt by all; it’s a collective sufferance. The soldier is an actor playing a part in the political scene; sometimes he is part of the stage, and other times not. The soldiers appear in some images but they are always in the same position, lying face down, toward the mattress. In other images, the mattress is missing its soldier; the empty space waits to be filled, waits for the next conflict. During such operations, it’s very easy to captivate the audience by images and sounds of the ‘war machines’. It is a magnet; it draws the finger to the camera shatter, as the soldier's finger to the trigger. My soldiers in ‘Positions’ becomes a metaphor for my internal feelings. My body and soul are exhausted from our reality and I was searching for other conceptual angles to accurately depict my state of mind - far away from the war machines. In the fifth image from the series ’Position number 5’, we cannot see the soldier but his mass is there. The image demonstrates a tension between the soldier yearning for sanity, using his children's blanket, and reality. But even the blanket isn't peaceful; it portrays a cartoon from an action film, maybe because the controversial behavior of Israel is a mixture of fantasy and reality.