In phases of profound political upheaval, works of art often experience a second birth: what was once conceived as a formal exploration of aesthetic principles or an abstract reflection on social ideals becomes, in new contexts, a living, resonant space for contemporary experiences. What originally appeared as a poetic utopia for a communal vision can, under the impact of real violence, turn into an unwitting document of collective trauma. Likewise, a light installation intended to foster introspection and playful self-inquiry can become a detached mirror of the security needs of individuals and entire societies, as soon as experiences of political violence shape public perception.

In this tension between the artist’s original intention and its historically conditioned reception, the transformative power of art comes to light: it no longer functions solely as an autonomous aesthetic object, but as a medium of critical remembrance, in which the boundaries between idea and reality, past and present, intention and effect become fluid. Especially in times when political events shake the collective psyche, revisited or newly exhibited works open up unforeseen dimensions of meaning, challenging artists and audiences alike to rethink solidarity and actively shape memory. In this way, every artwork becomes a dialogue partner for a society negotiating grief, vulnerability and hope.

This shift is evident, for example, in the video work Rehearsing the Spectacle of Spectres (2014) by Nir Evron and Omer Krieger. It opens with a wide aerial shot of the Gaza Strip, filmed by a drone hovering just a few kilometres from the border, outside the kibbutz. This initial view establishes a geopolitical tension that underlies the entire work. The second shot moves to the central gathering area of the kibbutz – showing the dining hall, the general secretary’s office and the public assembly house – introducing the social and architectural core of the community. In calm, gliding camera movements, the lens then continues to explore both public and private spaces of the kibbutz, creating an interplay between collective expansiveness and individual intimacy. Interspersed among these sequences are close-ups of speakers reciting a poem by Anadad Eldan – sometimes in a single take, sometimes layered one upon another, their voices coalescing into a visible and audible community. The precise framing evokes minimalist cinema, while also providing a sober stage for the performative encounter of space and voice. The sound mix merges the Hebrew recitation of Eldan’s 26-verse poem with ambient noises – birdsong, the rush of wind, faint conversations. Multilingual subtitles (Hebrew/English/German) open the work to an international audience and underscore the transnational reception of collective memory.

Rehearsing the Spectacle of Spectres, Nir Evron, Omer Krieger, 2014, HD video with stereo sound, 10 min., Hebrew with German and English subtitles 

At the heart of the video lies Eldan’s poem, whose alliterative, biblically inflected language invokes the kibbutz’s utopian ideal as a space of collective existence. By giving equal prominence to various speakers – including Eldan himself, who was ninety years old at the time of filming and is now 101, and, posthumously, Hagay Avni, who later fell victim to the attacks – remembering is transformed into a performative act in which individual life stories fuse into a polyphonic chorus. The intimate close-ups grant the spoken word a corporeal presence and emphasise the vulnerability of human voices in the face of violence and loss. The title, Rehearsing the Spectacle of Spectres, alludes to an ongoing rehearsal of one’s own history, in which the ‘spectres’ – ghosts of the past – are continually restaged and renegotiated. This metaphor makes clear that collective memory and utopian visions are at once spectral and theatrical: the kibbutz ideals appear here as a staged exercise, only to become, under the real trauma of 7 October 2023, an unwitting document of historic violence.

In the wake of those events, the peaceful architectural landscapes of the kibbutz resonate like silent memorials, simultaneously evoking past security and present vulnerability. As a transnational intervention, the work directly confronts a Western audience with the global entanglements of conflict, trauma and solidarity, raising questions of cultural responsibility and the politics of remembrance. On repeated viewings of Nir Evron and Omer Krieger’s video, one constantly catches oneself overlaying the horrific media images of 7 October onto the film’s hushed, documentary-style camera movements. It is as if the archive of terror shaped by television, social media and news outlets projects itself in real time back onto the artistic material. This effect is not only a personal superimposition, but can also be understood in terms of media theory as a form of ‘remediation’ – the medium of art becomes the venue for the media image shocks that, consciously or unconsciously, inscribe themselves. With each replay, these images surface again, demanding the question: can one still see with any neutrality?

What occurs here is a kind of retroactive image infection: works created before 7 October 2023 appear retrospectively contaminated – not by any change in their content but by the new media circumstances in which they are received. This is especially striking in the interplay of architecture and violence, of refuge and exposure: the kibbutzim depicted, originally conceived as social utopias, now read in hindsight as fragile façades, their aesthetic quietude haunted by ghostly associations. As viewers – and thus as part of that Western, digitally networked audience – we are drawn, through our own media conditioning, into this new constellation of images. It is as though collective memory is being remounted in the present – not only in archives and commemorative acts but in the silent motion of a camera, in the aesthetic repetition of a place shattered by real events. Here, art becomes a medial threshold: it produces no new images of terror, yet it repeatedly summons them along with it, whether it intends to or not.

The work and its effects unfold in a double dynamic: on the one hand, Rehearsing the Spectacle of Spectres appears as a literary-poetic reflection – its alliterative, utopian vision of the kibbutz fusing communal ideals with biblically tinged language. On the other, in the media-shaped aftermath it mutates into an unwitting archive, into which the horrific images of 7 October are constantly projected: the calm, wide shots of the architecture retrospectively take on the aura of silent memorials to terror, and the intimate portraits of the reciters become witnesses to a collectively endured trauma. This sense of shared experience is further intensified by the close-ups of the speakers, whose voices blend through overlapping takes into a polyphonic chorus, creating a collective atmosphere in which both solidarity and alienation are palpable. Thus the poem – originally conceived as a poetic utopia – resonates in the wake of real violence as a moving testament to a reality transformed by brutality. In Rehearsing the Spectacle of Spectres, these lines are fulfilled time and again – both as spoken recitation and as the echo of a community shaken, but not broken, by violence. The work functions simultaneously as a poetic document of utopian ideals and as an involuntary archive of actualised violence. Yet the power of this poetry does not end with the Be’eri kibbutz context: it expands into the universal question of how we live together amid pain and protection.

Just as Evron and Krieger poured the silent monuments of pain and hope into moving images, Ariel Reichman shifts the site of collective experience back into the here and now: Safe/notSafe no longer treats the ‘verses’ of memory as a static archive, but translates them into a pulsating field of individual choice. Instead of close-ups and sound collages, we confront the hand-lit glow of neon letters that confront each of us with the question “Am I safe?” as an immediate, tangible scenario. Where once the spoken word summoned community, Reichman’s interactive light piece invites us to actively negotiate the balance between safety and vulnerability – making our collective mood a luminous metaphor for our shared existence. By offering two opposing slogans – “I AM SAFE” and “I AM NOT SAFE” – which viewers can activate via a website or push-button, Reichman turns our fluctuating sense of security into a visual, participatory event.

Since its debut in 2021 at Berlin’s PSM Gallery, Ariel Reichman’s Safe/notSafe has felt like a quiet meditation on the fragile relationship between individual perception and collective safety – located in an abstract, almost timeless realm. The installation’s minimalist materiality – two neon modules measuring 106 × 34.5 × 35.5 cm, crafted from acrylic, steel and Arduino technology – formally references the tradition of conceptual light art and invites calm contemplation on the ambivalence of protection and threat. But after 7 October 2023, this work’s reading has been radically transformed: the binary choice between “I AM SAFE” and “I AM NOT SAFE” is no longer merely a personal play with identity or mood, but a condensed sign of collective upheaval.

Against the backdrop of a dramatically altered political and affective reality – particularly in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict since 7 October 2023 – Ariel Reichman’s Safe/notSafe undergoes a striking shift in meaning. Whereas at its 2021 debut at PSM Gallery the work inhabited an open field of interpretation, centred on personal reflections of the need for protection, vulnerability and subjectivity, it now functions as a precarious seismograph of collective insecurity. The installation’s strict formal reduction – two identical neon modules whose slogans “I AM SAFE” and “I AM NOT SAFE” are triggered by a digital or tactile impulse – now operates less as a purely conceptual gesture and more as a visual condensation of a perpetual state of exception. When the letters glow, they pulse like signals through the fog of a global architecture of fear, in which the boundary between individual feeling and geopolitical reality grows ever more ambiguous.

When the piece was re-staged in December 2023 at the Mishkan Museum of Art in Ein Harod – simultaneously projected at Kunsthalle Mannheim and Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg – it gained a new conceptual frame as a transnational communication network. By linking multiple locations through a digital interface, viewers around the world can now co-shape the work through their own choice, symbolically articulating their personal sense of safety. This opening toward a ‘distributed experience’ transforms the minimalist light installation into a relational, media-architectural field: a temporary platform for affective synchronisation, an aesthetic interface of collective vulnerability that responds to the current crisis not by specifying content but through formal responsiveness. It is precisely this juxtaposition of technical simplicity and emotional complexity that gives the work its renewed urgency: rather than confronting its audience with a definitive political statement, it offers structural openness, making the state of exception itself an aesthetic experience.

 

Safe/notSafe, Ariel Reichman, Mishkan Museum of Art, Ein Harod. Photo: Ran Arda

At the same time, the work’s functioning on the level of reception has fundamentally changed: what in 2021 was read as a conceptual experiment between minimal form and maximal meaning – a meditation on identity, affect and perception in public space – today operates as an interactive archive of affect, in which states of fear, calm, alienation or hope are visually registered and transmitted into the digital realm. The clear, semantically polarised structure (SAFE / NOT SAFE) gains new depth against the current political backdrop: every decision, every click, every glow becomes a real articulation of subjective uncertainty within a globalised communication system.

This shift from contemplative sculpture to intermedial field of experience elevates Safe/notSafe beyond the tradition of conceptual light art. The work becomes a participatory aggregator of affective resonance, an open, fluidly coded repository of collective states in times of crisis. It is precisely in the simultaneity of multiple individual inputs that a new quality of the communal emerges: the act of declaring oneself safe or unsafe becomes a performative gesture within a community defined not by territory but by atmosphere. In this reading, Safe/notSafe no longer poses a question to its audience – it becomes the question itself: how safe is the world when safety can no longer be assumed generally but only asserted individually?

At the heart of Safe/notSafe’s aesthetic logic lies in the digital interface as an epistemic instrument and affective threshold between self-assertion and collective visibility. The online interface – accessible at https://iamnotsafe.digital – does more than extend the installed work functionally; it transposes it into a media-dispositive structure that fundamentally reflects on the conditions of artistic reception in the age of algorithmic publics. This dual address – analogue and digital in parallel – points to the hybrid topology of contemporary subjectivity production, in which individual experience is increasingly determined by networks of mediated interactions. By choosing between the dichotomous positions “SAFE” or “NOT SAFE”, users perform not just affirmation or negation, but contribute to a globally visible register of affective positioning.

This interactive constellation creates a dialogical space that reaches beyond the physical exhibition venue and deconstructs museum architecture as an exclusive site of art reception. What manifests in the gallery as a minimalist glowing object transforms online into a relational interface that carries the aesthetic experience from contemplation into action – from observer to co-creator. The artwork thus becomes an aesthetic-political feedback system that aggregates, visualises and transmits affective states in real time into a kind of digital resonance field. By opening his work through its media infrastructure, Reichman situates himself within art-theoretical discourses that conceive of art no longer as a closed form but as a processual, relational practice – a place where political sensitivities, social shocks and subjective fragilities become visible and negotiable.

Safe/notSafe, Ariel Reichman, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. Photo: Marek Kruszewski

 

Safe/notSafe, Ariel Reichman, Kunsthalle Mannheim. Photo: Studio Ariel Reichman

 

The question of safety is no longer represented thematically but inscribed structurally in the work. “Am I safe?” loses its rhetorical character and emerges as a structuring principle that not only compels reflexive self-inquiry but also fundamentally destabilises the aesthetic relationship between artwork and audience. Within this destabilised configuration lies Safe/notSafe’s true political quality: it is not about conveying a stance, but about opening an ambivalent space of possibility in which art, public and subjectivity enter into new relations to one another.

The digital interface makes viewers not merely an audience but implicit co-producers of collective moods. The reduction to binary decision-logics lays bare the ambivalence of this process: what seems to be a simple choice exposes the fragility of decision-making itself – as a performative provocation amid political and emotional overdetermination. In this way, Safe/notSafe renders productive the very tension that defines our present: the simultaneity of participation and powerlessness, visibility and insecurity, agency and precarious existence.

In comparing the two works – Evron and Krieger’s Rehearsing the Spectacle of Spectres and Reichman’s Safe/notSafe – a paradigmatic shift becomes apparent in the relationship between art, memory and the present. Both pieces were originally conceived in other historical constellations, born as poetic, conceptual or speculative forms that did not mirror social conditions but modelled them. Yet their reception after 7 October 2023 settles over their aesthetic structure like a second skin – it changes the works’ very state of being. Of course, art has always been open to historical accretions; meaning is never fixed but emerges relationally among artwork, context and audience. What is distinct about the post-7 October situation is the urgency with which collective trauma – anchored in concrete images, voices and losses – inscribes itself into reception. The media images of that day, in their unprocessable brutality, act as an inexhaustible overlay that projects itself relentlessly onto earlier artistic productions. It is not merely that we see differently, it is that we must see differently, because images of destruction and pain no longer stand apart but sear themselves into the works as residue, even when those works predate the event. In Rehearsing the Spectacle of Spectres, this occurs through a reactivation of its utopian premise: what was once a tender retrospective on the collectivist ideals of the kibbutz system becomes, in the light of Be’eri’s destruction, a spectral prelude to real violence. The ‘spectres’ the work invokes no longer exist solely as figures of intellectual history or aesthetic constructs – they have returned as horror, as loss, as what endures after destruction. The video images, once poetic simulations of memory, now unwillingly serve as visual stand-ins for dehumanising attacks. The media-theoretical notion of ‘remediated trauma’ takes concrete form here: the original footage becomes the projection surface for collective visual memory, overlaid by the harrowing media images that shaped global understanding of the 7 October attacks. What began as a literary utopia has become an involuntary archive of the failure of protection. Ariel Reichman’s Safe/notSafe, by contrast, originally a conceptually minimalist reflection on the feeling of safety, undergoes a radical recoding through this historical watershed. Its binary structure – “I AM SAFE” versus “I AM NOT SAFE” – turns into a symbolic shorthand for a world in which that question ceases to be rhetorical and becomes a diagnostic of existence. The light installation steps out of minimalism’s formal rigour and mutates into a digital seismogram of collective fragility. What in 2021 felt like an aesthetic condensation of inner states has, by 2023, transformed into a global interface of the state of exception. The artwork becomes an ethical challenge: it demands a stance, forces positioning and confronts its audience with an ontological uncertainty that is no longer metaphorical. Both works thus open spaces where individual experience and collective memory intersect.

What is new after 7 October 2023 is not the fundamental mutability of meaning, but the inescapability of a traumatic context that filters every aesthetic experience. Art is no longer perceived as a stable interpretive realm, but as an unstable construct that itself trembles with the world’s upheavals. Its aesthetic language remains, but its semantic temperature has shifted. This new situation also demands a changed perspective from the writer: as author, as viewer, as participant and observer, I find myself in a double position. I am part of the historical present through whose lens I read the work – but I am also transformed by the works themselves, because they reveal how memory, politics and poetry coalesce into a new form. Perhaps this is the deeper meaning of what has changed in art since 7 October: not that art itself has changed, but that we who behold it have – and with us the questions we bring to it.

Nir Evron (b. 1974 in Herzelia, Israel; lives and works in Berlin) explores the construction of political and social histories through films, videos and photography. Mining charged artefacts – monuments, modernist buildings, archival documents and forgotten biographies – he fuses meticulous historical research with reflexive, medium-specific inquiries. His practice exposes the material apparatus of image-making while asking how ideology becomes embedded in visual form. He has exhibited internationally, with solo shows at the Jewish Museum, Berlin; LAXART, Los Angeles; ICA @ VCU Richmond; and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, among others. He has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including those at the New Museum, New York; FOMU, Antwerp; the ICP Triennial, New York; Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; and the 6th Berlin Biennale.

Omer Krieger (b. 1975 in Tel Aviv-Jaffa; lives and works in Berlin) studies the public experience through forms of collective expression, movement and assembly, and creates performative actions, transgressive rituals, political situations and civic choreographies in public spaces. He co-founded and led the performative research and action body Public Movement from 2006 to 2011, before co-founding and leading as artistic director the 1:1 Center for Art and Politics, Tel-Aviv (2018–20). His performances and video works have been shown internationally, in Berlin at the Maxim Gorki and HAU theatres, the Jewish Museum, the Georg Kolbe Museum et al. His forthcoming performance will premiere at the Gorki’s Herbstsalon in October 2025.

Ariel Reichman (b. 1979 in South Africa; lives and works in Berlin.) Freud preferred the form of the silent word, that is, of the symptom, which is the trace of a story. This would be a good description of Reichman’s practice: he creates objects and artistic artifacts that evoke feelings of confusion and conflicting emotions. Often, they cannot be resolved, and in that way they are analogous to the contemporary conditio humana. Reichman creates an ambiguous and subtle play between private and collective memory, apparent idyll and subliminal brutality. He has exhibited at Kunsthalle Mannheim; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; KW; Kunstverein in Hamburg; Goodman Gallery; and PSM, among others. In 2025 he opened a solo exhibition Keiner Soll Frieren! at the Felix Nussbaum House in Osnabrück. The exhibition runs until May 2026 and will be accompanied by talks and workshops.

Daniel Laufer is an artist and curator, teaching artistic and aesthetic practice at Leuphana University Lüneburg and the State Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe. He creates hybrid film installations merging cinematic language with visual art. His dreamlike, non-linear narratives explore memory, myth, and storytelling, destabilizing temporal logic and generating immersive spaces where perception becomes a stage. Drawing on a media-archaeological approach, he combines historical and contemporary filmic techniques with language, painting, scenery, and performance into intermedial constellations. He has exhibited internationally, including Artists Space, New York; Jewish Museum Berlin; Jewish Museum Frankfurt; Kunstmuseum Bonn; Kunstverein Hannover; Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof; and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin. Forthcoming solo exhibitions include Kunsthalle Lingen and Rib Rotterdam (2026). He has also published in Texte zur Kunst and the Journal of the Dubnow Institute, among other publications.