Tehran – Whether in Norway or Nigeria, it washes down television and rejects unbearable sights. The image penetrates too deeply, gentle grinding that is easily broken. At that moment, denial protects her heart. The pain in the world is too close. But silence has its own weight – the silent witness of grief is not too vast.
In Gaza, catastrophe is not an episode. Layered, persistent, and at the same time. The community of death, hunger and destruction in rhythm is extremely dense and paralyzes the global gaze. The saturation of this crisis does not amplify anger. It silences perception. The public is overwhelmed by the mercilessness of pain and retreat to passive despair. Art and language sway before such magnitude, tasks not elegantly portray pain, but rather confuses the anesthetic of distance.
While the bombs fall and the bodies collapse, the silence of the structured media ensures that the world rarely sees them. Through calculated delays, “neutral” framing, and selective visibility, mainstream outlets transform atrocities into abstractions. This is not ignorance, it is a design. Victims are omitted not through lack of footage but through editing codes that prioritize comfort over conflict. The erased life in Gaza is evidence. Tragedy can be hidden in plain sight. Journalism, once a witness, is now serving as a filter.
The body of Gaza is distorted by hunger, fire and power, and becomes a form that is invisible to the human eye. Famine etches bones against the skin. The explosion erases the identity of the face. Burns turns meat into an abstraction. The result is not just a physical erase, but an aesthetic erase. These transformations obscure the humanity of the victim and cut off the image from the ability to build relationships with the audience. Art cannot “express” such violence. You have to stand up to it without filters or phors. When the body refuses to recognize it, it requires calculations rather than depictions.
Gaza erasure is not only physical, but cognitive, aesthetic and systematic. Media silence, artistic practices, display logic, and colonial policies form a synchronized architecture of invisibility. The victim is not silenced by a dull force, but by exclusion from the interpretive frame. The language of art will fail them. The politics of presentation dismiss them. This adjustment is not just about skipping life, but about understanding itself. To talk about Gaza is to stand up to a web of deletion that the dominant lens interferes with rather than revealing.
In the face of unfiltered atrocities, traditional artistic language is lacking. Aesthetic tools (forms, philosophers, compositions) capture and grasp raw violence without softening or obscuring it. Instead of exposing evil, they stylize it and frag the suffering within the code, which means walls of the gallery. This is not an abstraction, it is an evasion. In Gaza, pain resists glorification. If Atrocity rejects the Philosophor, art must abandon Polish and techniques for witnessing in person. Beauty cannot translate suffering. It just postpone it. Conflict requires rupture rather than grace.
Reconstructing the vision involves more than restoring the victim’s image. Their absence is beyond visibility. It inhabits imagination, language and relationships. The system of perception erased the victim not only from vision but from meaning. To reveal violence, we need to not only present our injured body, but also change how we perceive it. It is a structural change that brings the truth to its focus. The gaze must cut through beauty and recognize what has been excluded. This rupture-free expression risks repeated erasures that you attempt to expose.
A scene of suffering risks becoming a second time violence. Audiences may feel sympathy when the victim’s pain changes into a tragedy of visual objects or consumables, but not solidarity. This glorification keeps the viewer away from responsibility. Emotional responses replace ethical responses. Instead of being involved in the victim’s condition, we consume it. It is wrapped in an image separated from the cause. Such expressions create comfort for the witness, but cannot challenge accomplice. To truly alliance with the victim, the gaze must refuse entertainment.
Distant defensive viewers avoid confronting violence not from cruelty but from the vulnerability of sightings. Global viewers often retreat to denial and detachment, protecting themselves from the discomfort of accomplice. The act of seeing becomes threatening because of demands for ethical beings, not because of image atrocities. This avoidance reflects a fragile position. He refuses to live in the scene accountable. Rebuilding the vision means destroying this shield, facing ruptures, and accepting the cost of proximity.
The language of the victim – cillence, stud, broken words – should not be reconstructed by analytical discourse. It must be entered into fracture, raw, unresolved works. These utterances are not a comparative phor for expression. They are documents of erasure. Refining them is to betray them. The voices of fragmented, injured victims carry the truth more powerfully than sophisticated commentary. Let the rupture speak for itself. It holds traces of what was denied.
The place of violence in Gaza should not be staged as an emotional background. Bread lines, crushed hospitals, ruined houses – these are documents of erasure, not for dramatic effects. As the site where the deletion itself occurred, they must enter work without frames. Aestheticizing these spaces is to forge them. Their presence remains raw and they have to resist choreography, so the audience encounters their absence as fact rather than as a spectacle, and their weight is not mediated.
The slow death in Gaza is no coincidence. It is designed. Malnutrition and medical deprivation act as intentional machines, creating death that is neither natural nor exceptional. Art cannot treat these as tragedy of destiny. It needs to expose their architecture. The task is not a narration, it is a revelation. It removes the disguise of necessity and shows the transformation of intention, policy and design into planned erasures of human life.
The job of art is to resist silence without turning wounds into sight. They must erase and pull back the victim, refusing to show the graphically enough that the viewer retreats. Art must stabilize the gaze. It will last enough to restore the victim’s location in human relations, but be careful not to turn the pain into a barrier. Witnesses must be replaced by voyeurism. Being must replace the safe distance of pity.
Art must reconstruct the structure of relations from violence not through decorative empathy but by returning the victim to the position of the counterpart rather than the object. The task requires dismantling the distance that turns humans into scenes. It is not emotion that repairs a violation, it is a refusal to let people see life. To see is to stand together.
The image of the victim must stand as a prosecution, not an ornament. A burnt corpse, a hungry body, cannot be offered for aesthetic judgment or glorified for display. Such images belong to the accusation archives rather than the area of preference. They need to equip the viewers with the structures that generated them, and face the viewers as evidence so that their gaze cannot escape the weight of their claims.
From collective death, this work must not only testify, but also outline the future of man. It cannot be stopped due to catalog loss. We must open up the possibilities of life after violence. This is not a soft promise of hope, but a strict discipline of responsibility. It is a demand to imagine a world where the dead cannot be forgotten and the livelihood must answer for them.
Photo: This year’s 2025 world reporter’s photo shows 9-year-old Mahmoud Ajur, injured in an Israeli attack in Gaza city in March 2024.