History Painting 2025 – 215 x 83cm, acrylic on unstretched canvas
Israel broke it all. The international mainstream media, prevented from reporting the truth. Israel flagrantly dismantled the rule of international law, they ignored the rules of military conduct regarding civilians and residential areas. A new documentary by ITV reveals the confessions of IDF soldiers, that confirm the above, basically what we all knew already. Israel made western governments toe the line so they could enact a genocide, and as our public institutions buckled under the weight of Israel’s power, relinquishing their own sovereignty, so the lies piled up creating a false narrative that becomes evermore absurd.
The books, rendered in the Palestine flag hues, aren’t just generic volumes; they become stand-ins for narratives, records, and identities, that are often marginalised, erased, or “history-washed” in dominant discourses. History books as physical objects imply authority and permanence, but here they’re tilting, uneven, and abstracted, suggesting instability, omission, or deliberate revisionism. The small canvas feels like a whispered critique, a single “shelf” of precarious knowledge, while the larger one amplifies it into a towering archive, row after row of fragmented stories that could topple at any moment. I ask ‘Whose history gets shelved neatly, and whose gets skewed, omitted, or recoloured to fit a narrative?’ This ties directly into broader debates on historical revisionism, where “history-washing” plays out in real time, whether through textbooks that downplay colonial legacies, media framings that omit Palestinian perspectives, or institutional silences on ongoing conflicts. The flag colours make it impossible to ignore the specificity: these aren’t neutral books; they’re charged with national symbolism, representing suppressed voices in the “official” historical canon.