ROEE ROSEN

On the Gaza War Tattoos, 2024 / 2025

The attack by Hamas on October 7th, 2023, with over a thousand Israelis massacred and more than 250 kidnapped, has lead to unprecedented mass killing – more than 50,000 Palestinian dead as I write this, systematic destruction of hospitals and decimation of entire cities, starvation and blocking humanitarian aid, and other war crimes that are still ongoing in Gaza.

The photos of the Gaza War Tattoos constitute a troubled attempt to respond to some of those events in real time. Whereas the first batch of images, produced in 2024, are emulations realized with MakeUp and stickers, the second batch consists of actual tattoos, with the models choosing to have their bodies carry permanently their disturbing content and imagery.

The images veer erratically from open-ended cyphers (figurations of notions such as “witnessing,” “evidence,” “listening”), to echoing aspects of the destruction meted in Gaza (the burning of hospitals and schools), to tackling of concrete events and places, as well as the often oxymoronic language of nationalistic and military terminology bracketing the events.

To cite two examples: areas declared by Israel as safe zones became sites of massive bombardment and civil death, and the coinage total victory is reiterated ad-nauseam by the Israeli prime-minister as the goal of the war, a vacuous abstraction designed to perpetuate the war as never-ending (but also describing, an always-already manifold loss). An exceptional piece within the series, and its only purely-verbal design, is the poem The Dreadful Dreidel, which is composed exclusively from the names given by the Israeli army to its assaults on Gaza during the current century.

The first part of the series was commissioned by Steirischer Herbst (curators: Ekaterina Degot and David Riff). Creative team: Tattoo artist: Roy Vexler, Photography: Goni Riskin, Digital Editing: Galit Aloni and Irma Arieli, Production: Ahal Eden