Building the Poor Image    
Cité Internationale des Arts – Paris, 2026

Mixed-media installation, comprising cardboard sculptures, a print, and looped security camera footage

Bus Driver Seat
30×30×50 cm
Cardboard

Building the Poor Image was created out of photographic testimonies of violence against Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. I originally collected these images for investigative purposes as a data coordinator for B’Tselem, a Palestinian-Israeli NGO, where I continue to work.  

Tracing the movement from embodied, three-dimensional reality to flattened digital imagery, the project engages in a process of transition. Here, digital artifacts, produced in moments marked by brute force and injury, are reconfigured within the spatial conditions from which they originally emerged. In so doing, this investigation generates new, critical engagements with violence.  

Installation view
Print, 8.5×8 cm
A reproduction from investigative footage of the attack
on a bus driver by police officers in East Jerusalem,
8 May 2023, used by B’Tselem (btselem.org)

Installation view
Tablet screening
Security camera footage courtesy of Mujahed Shalabi,
B’Tselem, 27 Aug 2023 (btselem.org)

Photographs and videos captured by personal phone cameras or on security footage are ubiquitous today. But we often consume them fleetingly. They circulate on social media, in news outlets, or even as forensic evidence. Detached from their original contexts, these mementos rarely hold our collective attention long enough to reveal their deeper human, social, and political dimensions.

Enlarged and reconstructed, the two monochromatic cardboard sculptures become focal points of different recorded scenes. A mosaic bearing the word “WELCOME” from the courtyard of a Palestinian home vandalized during an Israeli settler invasion is converted into a fragment of a bigger topography. A Palestinian bus driver is assaulted in his seat by border police officers; his cabin stands vertically with the support of fictional parts.

WELCOME
Detail




WELCOME
90×80×80 cm
Cardboard

Installation views






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