With our festival this year, we aim to give a platform to those artists who embrace controversy and confrontation. If you could offer a stage to one radical artist yourself, who would it be and why?

I know the worthy intention of the question is to point at someone current and preferably underexposed, but the first name that came to my mind and refused to leave is that of Franz Kafka, whose death centennial is marked this year. The premise of a Kafka piece, be it a novel (always unfinished), or something as short as an aphorism, often entails a devastating shattering of preconceptions, both in terms of basic human experiences, and in terms of the machinations of literature. Moreover, there is in Kafka a merging of the bodily with the political and the social in a way that is still profoundly unsettling (think of the execution by inscription of justice on the body in ‘In The Penal Colony’, where the law is literally inscribed on the body as a form of torture and eventually death, or of Gregor Samsa, the traveling salesman turned vermin, secreting green slime on the family’s living-room walls.

Finally, it is well worth mentioning that Kafka was often perceived with resentment by ideologically driven radicals; the communist party in France, for example, held a serious debate in the 1950s on the suggestion of condemning Kafka as a bourgeois decadent. In other words, it is a confusing manifestation of the radical, characterised not by direct solutions or answers, but by a probing sense of destabilisation.

As part of our exhibition The Cake Is a Lie, you created The Gaza War Tattoos – a series of photographs documenting 18 tattoos you designed to respond to and reflect on the war in Gaza. What inspired you to use tattoos as a medium, and how does your choice challenge taboo and propaganda while still engaging critically with the complexity of the world through art, society, academics, and politics?

The current war is so shocking and unprecedented in terms of scope and calamities that for a long time I did not think I was capable of responding to it through art. The project sneaked in through the back door, so to speak; I was talking with the curators David Riff and Ekaterina Degot about showing older works, and one was a tattoo image; it was my response to an earlier brutal attack of Israel on Gaza back in 2008, a fake tattoo I hand-painted on the buttocks of a friend. It featured a hybrid of a star of David and a coffin in which lay a skeletal Mickey Mouse (suggesting both the death of children, and the American support of Israel). Above the image was the inscription Beyond Guilt, and the dates 1948 – 2008; 1948 being the year of the establishment of the State of Israel and the Palestinian Nakba. From the thought of updating that image evolved the thought of something much more complex, an idea to make a fragmented assembly of different painted bodies creating a strange chronicle of the war, wherein expressions would veer erratically from very concrete and critical images to ones that are more ambiguous.

I spoke before about the inscription of the political on the body in Kafka, and I can say that in a very different way it has also been a trait of many of my works, and that the different histories of tattoos, both as bodily decoration and as conveyors of identity, remembrance and ideology seemed to resonate in rather troubling ways here (at least for me). The last part of your question touched upon challenging taboo and propaganda. One of the things that surprised me during this war is the extent to which almost all of the mainstream media in Israel became a one-sided self-censoring entity, in which images of Palestinian suffering are non-existent, while the tragic events of October 7th are discussed over and over again, so the perception is instilled of Israelis as victims, which, of course, becomes a tool in perpetuating the war. In other words, the real tragedy of October 7th becomes a part of a propaganda machinery.

Most artistic responses in Israel to the war thus far also focused on the sense of loss, suffering and trauma; I do not doubt the authenticity of these sentiments as such, but as Naomi Klein pointed recently, trauma can be put to political use, rendering Israelis as perpetual victims, tying the events of October 7th to the Holocaust, and by doing so, they partake muting a sense of criticality, self reflection and opposition. In that sense, while I am not sure I am breaking taboos, I find myself, to my surprise, in a smaller minority than I would have expected.

DEAL WITH IT foregrounds art and artists that embrace controversy and dare to be radical. To what extent is ‘Dealing With It’ an effective strategy in discussing the war in Gaza, and how is this represented in your films Out and The Dust Channel?

While I see “dealing with it” as crucial, I think it is not yet a strategy, but an aim, so one can ask: what is the effective strategy to “deal with it”? One dominant category of “dealing with it” is activism, but even there the strategic question is crucial (IMPAKT features this year the work of The Yes Men, whose brand of activist strategy employs a convergence of parody and reality to achieve effects that are unattainable through, let’s say, demonstrations, or straight-faced documentary filmmaking). I do not see my work as activist, in the sense that it is not clearly and primarily set to cause a concrete change, and also because there is a primary interest in aesthetics in what I do. But: I do believe that ethics and aesthetics are always connected, and – there is a certain kinship to what I do with the strategies of The Yes Men, under the umbrella of what Lambert-Beaty famously called parafiction (that is, a defiance of the divide between art and life and fiction and reality that in fact stretched back at least to Dada). Out and The Dust Channel are two examples of such ploys.

The central scene of Out is both real and fiction: it is a BDSM scene performed by two women whose actual erotic predilection is to give and receive pain. While the blows are real, the submissive responds to them by spewing out sentences, all of which are quotes from an ultra-right Israeli politician, Avigdor Lieberman. Thus, a performance of private pleasure becomes also an act of political exorcism, with the connotations running from horror films to confessions under torture. The Dust Channel is an even more surreal hybrid, a cinematic operetta in which an affluent couple and the personnel serving in their villa all seem to be sexually obsessed with a Dyson DC07, a handsome appliance indeed. This explicitly Surreal homage (the film Andalusian Dog serves as the film’s structural and imagistic blueprint) leads to two documentary layers: the actual story of DC07 and his maker, and the xenophobic policy of Israel against refugee seekers who have fled to the country. To put it in a nutshell perhaps the strategy can be understood in terms of conflating mechanisms of seduction (beauty, eros, humour), with those topics we can barely otherwise face, but cannot in all truth run away from.