Sandwiched between Jerusalem’s Old City and the notorious Russian Compound detention facility stands the new glass-and-concrete campus of Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Israel’s oldest school of art and architecture.
For two weeks spanning June and July, the school’s second-floor gallery — whose transparent walls are just opaque enough to escape the notice of most passersby — hosted an exhibition quite unlike anything the institution has seen before. Titled “The Splinter,” it comprised some 20 works of sculpture, photography, and video confronting the Israeli violence unfolding beyond the campus windows.
On a hand-knotted rug, woven in the decorative style long associated with the Bezalel school, the words of Israel’s ubiquitous wartime slogan “Together we will win” repeated in Hebrew around a rectangular central frame. Evoking the expression “to sweep under the rug,” the work suggested that the brutality and destruction underpinning this nationalist fiction are kept out of sight.
Nearby, a bulky CRT monitor played a looping video of a young woman methodically assembling IKEA’s iconic LACK coffee table, accompanied only by the assembly instructions read aloud in conversational Arabic — apparently highlighting the subversive nature of the Arabic language appearing in Israel’s public sphere.
Other works addressed Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza; the settler shepherding outposts driving an unprecedented spike in ethnic cleansing of rural Palestinian communities across the occupied West Bank; the state’s systematic demolition of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem’s Silwan neighborhood, barely two kilometers from the campus; and life in the nearby Shuafat refugee camp, the only refugee camp within Israeli municipal boundaries, where a space designated for some 3,400 Palestinians now houses 60,000.
“The idea was to bring artworks for an explicitly political exhibition, not regulated by the institution’s preferences and exhibited in their original context, not the Bezalel way,” Nader Amerah, a recent graduate of the school and a member of Amal — a collective of Jerusalem-based Palestinian and Israeli artists, designers, and architects — told +972 Magazine ahead of the exhibition’s opening.
Rarely, if ever, in Bezalel’s history has the school exhibited works that confront Israeli state violence so directly, and in such close conversation with one another. More often, such pieces have appeared only in passing: a work on East Jerusalem tucked into the corner of an otherwise unrelated exhibition; another about the occupation hung elsewhere months later.
Getting the institution to sign off on “The Splinter” evidently required its organizers to tread carefully. Any suggestion that Bezalel itself might be implicated in the dynamics the exhibition criticises was absent from the open call, which instead hailed art’s capacity to expose the social structures that produce violence and domination.
But the artworks themselves leave no doubt as to the artists’ intentions. As fellow curator Yonatan Harel, an architect and graduate student in urban design who is also a member of Amal, put it, the aim was “to create a dense and concentrated exhibition that thrusts the political reality of genocide and ethnic cleansing in the face of viewers.”
A splinter of dissent
The exhibition, whose name is derived from the philosopher Theodor Adorno’s aphorism that “The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass,” was presented as a collaboration between the Bezalel Student Union, where it ran between June 21 and July 4, and the Student Union of the University of Applied Arts Vienna, where it ran between July 1 and July 4. Yet not a single artwork from the Viennese school appeared in either location.
The reason for this points to the exhibition’s peculiar place within the storm of global student activism responding to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. In October 2025, a student group at the Austrian university called on the institution to sever all ties with Bezalel. It was only one of a growing number of art schools — among them Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, several Norwegian academies, and institutions in The Hague and Rotterdam — where students and faculty have pushed to end institutional relations with Bezalel over its discriminatory treatment of Palestinian students, its ties to the Israeli military, and its failure to meaningfully oppose the genocide.
Those calls were not baseless. In the days after October 7, Bezalel unabashedly put its creative labor in the service of the military, hosting a volunteer sewing workshop to customize gear for soldiers and reservists. By the end of October 2023, the school had also suspended 14 Palestinian students — around one-fifth of its Palestinian student body — over social media posts expressing solidarity with Gaza or religious sentiments, without prior investigation or notice. Six were immediately expelled, while the remaining eight were subjected to disciplinary hearings.
Just three years earlier, around the opening of Bezalel’s new campus, academy president Adi Stern had described the school to Haaretz as “a very pluralist institution,” where “students and teachers can say whatever they want” because “art has to kick.” The months after October 7 exposed the limits of those claims at precisely the moment they mattered most.
The boycott campaign nevertheless opened an unexpected dialogue between the leadership of the two student unions. It began when Pasha Kogan, a student in Vienna, privately contacted Bezalel Student Union head Nadav Golan to better understand the political climate among Israeli students.
“It was the first time I ever got a message of this kind from abroad,” Golan recalled. “My colleagues at the National Union of Israeli Students told me to be careful, that the University of Applied Arts Vienna Union is the most antisemitic in Europe, but I took it with a grain of salt because I know what antisemitism means to them.”
The two soon arranged a meeting and kept talking. “We realized pretty fast that we agree on almost everything,” Golan said. “We’re both human rights activists and we both believe in emancipation and liberation for all people.”
As Kogan came to understand that members of the Bezalel union were openly opposing Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the conversations evolved into plans for a joint exhibition. “We realized we needed to do something together because the situation is urgent and we must act,” Golan said. “We don’t have the privilege of waiting around and being silent,” he added, which resonated with his conviction that change is still possible from within institutions.
The result was an open call for an exhibition that would, in its own words, “utilize institutional spaces to articulate a polyphonic political statement.”
Aestheticizing resistance?
Officially, the exhibition’s framing was not about Israel’s genocide in Gaza or Bezalel’s role within it, but more broadly about “fascism” and “weaving connections between anti-war positions thorough both local and global perspectives” — language certainly vague enough to accomodate the different constraints under which the two groups operated.
Harel told +972 that part of what excited him about the collaboration was the possibility that students in Vienna, “with freedom to create without awareness of supervision from above, would be able to create artwork that is more direct or at least less disguised” than anything that could emerge from inside the Jerusalem academy, and that exhibiting those works in Jerusalem would be an important political intervention. “We also believed that it could have given Israelis or Palestinians the opportunity to showcase works abroad that they wouldn’t feel comfortable showing here.”
But the proposal soon met resistance from the same boycott politics that had brought it into being. Students at the Viennese university, echoed by mostly Palestinian dissenting voices within Bezalel, called on their peers not to participate in the open call, arguing that an institution they viewed as complicit in genocide could not also function as a site of resistance. The exhibition in Jerusalem thus ultimately opened without any works by artists from the Viennese school, even as the collaboration remained intact through the parallel exhibition mounted in Vienna by its student union.
There, too, some students protested, placing handwritten signs at the entrance accusing the organizers of “aestheticizing resistance” and reminding them that “BDS is a practice.” The only rejoinder was another handwritten note, composed in Vienna at the Jerusalem curators’ request: “There is a literal fundraiser at the exhibition,” it read — a reference to the QR code through which visitors could donate to Palestinian residents of Silwan under threat of forced displacement.
The first works to greet visitors to the exhibition at Bezalel were reproductions of two posters that once hung on the University of Applied Arts Vienna campus, advertising the now-abandoned open call. Displayed side by side, they recreated the defaced originals: “Free” was scrawled across one in marker, “Palestine” across the other, faithfully reproducing the graffiti that transformed the posters in Austria. Beside them lay a pamphlet from the Viennese student union outlining its call for the university to divest from Bezalel.
Unlike the reflexive defensiveness with which institutional boycott is often met within Israel’s liberal cultural establishment, the exhibition did not present it as something to be scoffed at or rebutted. If anything, it absorbed the boycott into its own narrative, a move that could be read as disrespectful toward the Viennese students who opted to boycott Bezalel, but which also accounted for much of the show’s intrigue.
Harel, for one, described the boycott as “something students need to know about — they need to know their passivity is causing them to be boycotted.” Fellow curator and student Yael Assor added: “Addressing the question of boycott in the exhibition itself says to the viewer, as well as us students at Bezalel who participate in the confrontational exhibition, that we cannot keep thinking of ourselves just as individuals, separate from the larger policies and actions of the state in which we live. Nothing we create or aim to do is separate from its context.”
‘A city without citizens’
Among the exhibition’s most compelling works was “The City Should Be All Yours,” an eight-minute film combining found footage, 3D scans, archival photographs and documents, ambient recordings, and voiceover narration by its creator, a Palestinian architect who requested anonymity.
The work explores the question of citizenship in East Jerusalem — itself a paradoxical undertaking given the legal status of the city’s Palestinian population. Most are permanent residents, but not citizens, of Israel: governed and taxed by the Israeli state, yet denied the political rights of citizenship, including the right to vote in national elections.
Living in Jerusalem for the past seven years, the artist made the film as her architecture thesis project in the spring of 2025. One of its most memorable sequences lingers on the bustling commercial and cultural heart of East Jerusalem just beyond the Old City’s northern walls, along Salah Al-Din Street in the neighborhood of Bab Al-Zahra. Manipulating what appears to be Google Street View imagery, she zooms in and out of the streetscape, pivoting between grocery stores, bakeries, and toy shops, where pedestrians remain frozen mid-conversation, mid-stride.
The sequence plays with the tension between how Jerusalem looks from above and how it is experienced on the ground. From the aerial perspective, it appears as a dense, continuous urban fabric sustaining ordinary life. At street level, however, the city’s built environment is revealed as an instrument of control, with streets, rooftops, entrances, checkpoints, and biometric scanners all enlisted to regulate Palestinian movement. “On this level,” she said, “it may be understood as a ‘city without citizens.’”
The effect is numbingly video-game-like and unsettling. What might otherwise register as an ordinary, even lively urban landscape becomes a field of relentless observation, reenacting the way Palestinian life is rendered perpetually visible, searchable, and exposed.
The absurdity of the surveillance is accentuated by the soundtrack. Layered over the wandering digital gaze is audio from a scene in Elia Suleiman’s 2009 film “The Time That Remains,” in which a man in Nazareth takes out his trash while chatting on the phone, telling a friend he misses him and inviting him for drinks later at a Ramallah nightclub. Throughout the conversation, he pays almost no attention to the enormous Israeli tank stationed only a few meters away, whose turret rotates to follow his every move.
As the man proceeds entirely unfazed, stubbornly continuing with his mundane conversation, it is the tank that begins to feel strange, almost neurotic, in its insistence on following him. The scene reverses the familiar relationship between watcher and watched, while hinting at how deeply normalized such domination has become for Palestinians.
In Suleiman’s film, the director plays a mute version of himself, silently observing his younger self experience the transformation of Nazareth from the Nakba of 1948 through Israeli military rule and into the present. The artist, who chose to use her own voice to guide the viewer through Jerusalem’s legal and architectural contradictions, was nevertheless inspired by Suleiman’s figure of the silent witness.
“When I walk through this city thousands of times, have a meal here, pray here, observe and write about it, I relate to the idea that as a Palestinian you are silent but you witness very loudly,” she explained.
Sterilizing space
On the opposite side of the gallery, a familiar, repetitive hum reverberated through the space, emanating from a video work by artist Na’ama Eden Shapira. The camera is fixed to the dashboard of a vehicle entering a car wash in Ramat Gan, near Tel Aviv. Thick, rotating blue brushes strike the windshield before disappearing beneath layers of soap and foam.
Gradually, other images surface through the wash: the white facades of Tel Aviv’s Bauhaus buildings; uniform glass high-rises with blown-out windows, which Israeli viewers would immediately associate with an Iranian missile strike; damaged apartment blocks draped in oversized Israeli flags; those same apartments reduced to rubble; Israeli forces leveling residential towers in Gaza; bodies in blue shrouds loaded onto an excavator. When the car finally emerges, a woman sweeps the floor behind it.
“I tried to create a gradual escalation of this idea of cleaning,” Shapira told +972. “The constant washing immerses viewers in the visual world of the car wash. There’s also something about being inside a car wash [that makes] you feel as though you’re being washed as well.”
Shapira first presented the work at Bezalel’s 2025 graduate exhibition, where it was projected onto both sides of a translucent curtain, allowing the car wash and the destruction to bleed into one another. Plastic sheeting lined the gallery walls, with cleaning products placed behind it, creating what she described as “an attempt at sterility.”
The work grew out of Shapira’s research into practices of cleaning in architecture, which was shaped by her own family’s eviction from Givat Amal — an impoverished Mizrahi neighborhood of Tel Aviv whose residents were displaced between 2014 and 2021 to make way for a luxury development. Givat Amal was itself built on the former Palestinian village of Al-Jamassin Al-Gharbi, whose residents were expelled in the Nakba of 1948.
“I wanted to document a list of actions that I found they did to the space [in Givat Amal]: eviction, building, demolition, as well as cleansing,” she told me. “I found two moments of cleansing: One was of Palestinians during the Nakba of 1948; the other was of Mizrahi Jews by the European Jews in 2014,” the year her family was evicted from the neighborhood.
Similar processes, Shapira argued, are unfolding across Israel’s cities, where new urban developments consolidate numerous small plots into a single, large development under one owner and management company. “This way there is less visual ‘noise,’ less disorder, and more cleanliness and control,” she said.
Shapira sees this as a political practice, too: “the constant effort to remain ‘clean’ by cleansing oneself of the ‘other,’ where the ‘other’ is imagined as dirty.” Architecture, in turn, “becomes a tool for producing that sterility, which in turn produces control.”
The film’s slow escalation, in which washing a car gradually blends into ethnic cleansing, also rejects the notion that genocide arrives as a sudden rupture — or, in local terms, as an exceptional tragedy born of the shock of October 7 and the choices of the current Israeli government. “Genocide is the endpoint of a series of very recognizable practices,” Shapira said.
The film also offers another way of understanding the draping of Israeli flags over apartment buildings that have been damaged by Iranian missiles, prior to their demolition: Shapira sees this as yet another act of “cleaning.”
“There is genuine pain here,” she explained. “People have been hurt and lost their homes, at least temporarily, but the response of the state, society, or the system is to cover everything with an Israeli flag. Once again, this creates a cycle of more fascism, more ethnic cleansing, more destruction, and more control.”
Around the time Shapira was finishing her project, the Israeli Association of Architects announced a competition offering prizes of NIS 60,000 (around $20,000) for the design of a new military outpost, premised on the notion that October 7 had exposed the inadequacy of Israel’s existing army fortifications. “Of all the components of the failure on October 7 … the biggest mistake that led to the failure was the way the outposts were built,” declared the chair of the judging panel, retired general Giora Eiland, who had publicly advocated the starvation and ethnic cleansing of northern Gaza.
In a Haaretz interview about the competition, the association’s chairwoman, Orna Angel, argued that because “there won’t be a political solution anytime soon,” the border between Israel and Gaza would also need to be redesigned.
Tamir Mansour-Carmel, the competition’s initiator and a reserve armored battalion commander called up on October 7, similarly described collaboration between architects and the military as long overdue. “Architects know how to design structures that last for decades,” he told Haaretz. “They can put an end to the culture of covering one’s back and offer solutions that are elegant, efficient, protected, and integrated into the surrounding environment.”
Among the competition’s submission requirements was that the outposts “not harm the natural landscape.”
Fragments of home
Where Shapira confronted viewers with active destruction, a nearby work turned to its material aftermath. It was a constellation of 15 concrete bricks embedded with shards of stone, glass, and ceramic salvaged from demolished homes in Al-Bustan, a section of the Silwan neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem.
At first glance, each brick appeared to contain a sort of random mosaic. On closer viewing, the fragments began to resolve into the remains of kitchens and floors.
Most of the shards are cast into the concrete without regard for their original arrangement — a floral tile, a piece of flooring, fragments of stone from different homes becoming indistinguishable from each other. The exception is a small stone depiction of the Dome of the Rock, part of the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound (known in Arabic as Al-Haram A-Sharif). Though broken into three pieces, the artist carefully reassembled and cast it so that it could not fail to be recognized.
The artist, a recent Bezalel architecture graduate now pursuing a master’s degree in urban design at the school (who also requested anonymity), said the project began with a question: how to tell the story of Silwan through the eyes of the people that live there.
Starting in October 2025, she spent months visiting families in Al-Bustan and listening to their stories. “During those visits, I kept seeing fragments of demolished homes still scattered across the area,” she told +972. “Each time, I felt they were not simply rubble but part of a family’s story.”
Since October 7, the Jerusalem Municipality has demolished 47 homes in Al-Bustan to make way for a biblical theme park, while the neighborhood’s remaining Palestinian homes — which number between 80 and 90 — are also at high risk of demolition.
The stone-studded bricks were her attempt to preserve those stories in material form. “Each stone had its own place and its own story, and came to carry with it part of the memory of the home it came from,” she said.
There is always a risk that art made from the debris of violence can aestheticize it, inducing a feeling of vague admiration or appreciation for its beauty and divorcing it from its political context. Yet this temptation is punctured by the inclusion of the shattered Dome of the Rock, which continually pulls the viewer back to the fragments’ origin and anchors the work to its specific place and history.
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Still, getting close enough to notice some of these details proved unexpectedly difficult. When I returned to the exhibition several days after opening night, hoping to spend more time with the works in a quieter gallery, I walked through the school’s front entrance only to be stopped by three security guards, none of whom seemed aware that there was a public exhibition on the second floor. Only after checking the Instagram event invite themselves did they let me pass.
What may have been a simple failure of communication seemed to capture something of the exhibition’s curious status within the academy: permitted to exist — perhaps even to “kick,” as Bezalel’s president once put it — but not quite to become part of the institution’s public face.
