ASC 2026 – 24 x 18cm, acrylic on canvas
This painting operates differently from the YouTuber/Extraction Head works, it’s totemic, emblematic, condensing a complex geopolitical horror into a small, dense object that functions almost like a protest icon or a warning marker.
The Palestinian flag colors (red, white, green, black) are half-buried under a thick grey-black slurry. I’ve made the painting enact what’s happening: a national identity, a people’s right to self-determination, literally being covered over, paved under, built upon by reconstruction schemes that are really annexation plans. The fact that the colors are only partially visible, struggling to emerge or being pushed down, captures the precarity of Palestinian existence under these “development” proposals.
The green and yellow surveillance frames work differently here than in the YouTuber paintings. This isn’t digital monitoring; it’s territorial marking, zoning, the color-coding of occupation. Green for “safe zones” (safe for whom?), yellow for caution/construction/development. They’re the colors of infrastructure projects, master plans, the bureaucratic apparatus of ethnic cleansing dressed up as urban renewal.
The frames emanate towards the edges suggests contamination spreading, the logic of zoning and control expanding outward from the initial surveilled area. It visualizes how these schemes never stay contained, charter city logic, free zone logic, always metastasizes.
The Board of Peace as set out by Jared Kushner, and numerous partakers/advocates for the Gaza reconstruction ‘Master Plans’ is Orwellian to say the least. My painting captures that linguistic violence by showing what “peace” actually means in this context: burial, coverage, erasure. The billion-dollar entry fee, the roster of far-right autocrats (Milei, Orbán), it’s not reconstruction; it’s a real estate speculation scheme built on mass graves.
Norman Finkelstein’s point about tens of thousands of undiscovered bodies beneath future construction is the horror this painting makes visceral. That thick slurry of paint isn’t just covering the flag; it’s entombing. Every “Alternative Safe Community” built on top becomes a literal grave marker, infrastructure as monument to erased lives.
The small scale (24 x 18cm) makes it feel like a piece of evidence, something that could be held, carried, shown. Not a grand statement but a compact testimony, here’s what they’re doing, compressed into paint and canvas.
The painting refuses clean legibility. You can’t quite read the flag clearly, it’s struggling to be visible through the grey matter covering it. This mirrors how mainstream media coverage works: you get fragments, partial truths, things half-buried under euphemisms like “reconstruction” and “safe zones” and “peace plans.”
The surface texture makes the painting feel geological, archaeological, like an excavated layer of the future being brought back to show us. This connects directly to my charter cities activism. Gaza under these reconstruction schemes becomes the ultimate charter city nightmare: a territory where local population has no say, where international capital and authoritarian governments design the infrastructure, where “development” means displacement and erasure, where bodies become obstacles to overcome rather than humans to mourn.
The green and yellow frames also evoke construction site markings, safety tape, warning signs, but there’s no safety here, only the apparatus of occupation marking territory for extraction and control.
The painting is appropriately ugly, crude, unfinished-looking. Slick aesthetics would be obscene here. The rawness, the struggle of the colors to emerge, the thick paint as burial material, it all refuses to make atrocity beautiful or consumable.