From his first visit to Israel and the West Bank in late 2010, Fazal Sheikh came to believe that any effort to understand the region had to confront the Arab–Israeli War of 1948. In his words, “the war and its aftermath led to the depopulation of more than 450 Palestinian towns and villages and the flight of an estimated 700,000 Palestinians to neighboring countries, refugee camps, and areas under Israeli military rule. It was, in effect, the dissolution of Palestinian society, and has left a wound that has never healed.”

That the wound has never healed means that the violence, trauma, and ruin that were the signature of the war do not only belong to the past. They cannot even be said to be restricted to any single population or any one side of the conflict. This devastation can be read in the fact that Palestinians, Bedouins, and Israelis all find themselves in mourning. In asking us to be attentive to the history that simultaneously divides and binds these populations, Sheikh hopes to lay the groundwork for a potentially transformative empathy. What is at stake is the possibility of exposing and countering the various processes of erasure that have sought to erase both the violence of this history and the acts of erasure themselves. In making these histories of dispossession visible, Sheikh’s project, The Erasure Trilogy, from which this exhibition is taken, hopes to interrupt our historical amnesia, and to transform our understanding of this ongoing conflict. Eduardo Cadava