42 painted portraits of fallen fighters. On both sides of the wall, by reli-gious and secular communities alike, death in battle is glorified. On both sides of the wall a culture of memorization emerged: with ceremonies, songs, images and stories for those who fought and fell for their land. This glorification is used as a tool for the ongoing recruitment of new fighters; the own fallen are praised as heroes, the ones on the other side are demonized.

In Israel there is a memorial day for the dead soldiers – a special day that has a sacred aura for all layers of the Israeli-Jewish society. It is a day full of morbid ceremonies, with music and films on all the channels, on the radio and TV, including a "minute of silence" – when everybody stops at work, in classes, on the road, and stands still in the memory of the dead, while an alarm is heard all over the country.

This day is held one week after the sacred Holocaust Day, and one day before the Independence Day. In this way emotions are manipulated strongly, as ideas of victimhood, death, heroism and war are interwoven with national identity. At the same time, the idea of the shahid, “the mar-tyr” in Arabic, is thought of as a fanatic crazy phenomenon; victimhood, sacrifice and heroism of the other side cannot be comprehended.

In this memorial project, I try to break that spell and to expose the act of memorization as a form of interpretation. In these portraits, I assemble the fallen fighters of both factions and remove any evidence of their heritage. Their similarities become striking.

How can we react to the faces of these young men looking back at us, without realizing which side they fought for, when we don’t know if the blood they shed was “justified”, whether they were heroes or victims, protectors or perpetrators, terrorists or colonialist, martyrs or murderers?

Gallery Fisk, Bergen – February 2017