Refuge: The Courage to Witness
The main exhibition presents Hagit Barkai’s painted reflections on witnessing the destruction in Israel and Palestine from the intersection of personal and collective responsibility, victim and victimizer, trauma and privilege, as well as erasure and the production of personal and collective history. The work delves into themes of conflict and healing dialectics, exploring the mechanisms that block understanding of conflict and pathways to healing. The paintings measure the ethical and emotional distance from the horrors of human suffering as they unfold in real time. They ask what painting choices can be made through observation, image placement and markmaking to shift from enmeshed reactivity, denial, avoidance, complicity, isolation, and the illusion of separateness, toward a peace‑building response to human suffering and a renewed connection to human dignity.
