TEHRAN- A mother—whether in Norway or Nigeria—switches off the television, refusing the unbearable sight: a grieving mother in Gaza holding her child, starved to death. The image pierces too deep, shattering fragile calm. In that moment, denial shields her heart; the world’s pain presses too close. Yet the silence carries its own weight—a quiet witness to sorrow too vast to hold.

In Gaza, catastrophe is not episodic—it is layered, sustained, and simultaneous. Death, hunger, and destruction co-occur in rhythms so dense they numb the global gaze. This saturation of crisis does not amplify outrage; it silences perception. The public, overwhelmed by the relentlessness of pain, retreats into passive despair. Art and language falter before such magnitude, leaving the task not to depict suffering elegantly but to disrupt the anesthetic of distance—to awaken a human response where numbness has settled.

While bombs fall and bodies collapse, structured media silence ensures that the world rarely sees them. Through calculated delay, “neutral” framing, and selective visibility, mainstream outlets transform atrocity into abstraction. This is not ignorance—it is design. Victims are omitted not from lack of footage, but through editorial codes that prioritize comfort over confrontation. Gaza’s erased lives are proof: tragedy can be hidden in plain view. Journalism, once a witness, now acts as a filter—muting screams into background noise, curating absence.

Bodies in Gaza have been distorted—by hunger, fire, and force—into forms unrecognizable to the human eye. Starvation etches bone against skin; explosions erase facial identity; burns turn flesh into abstraction. The result is not merely physical obliteration but aesthetic erasure. These transformations obscure the victim's humanity, severing their image from the viewer’s capacity to relate. Art cannot “represent” such violence—it must confront it without filter or metaphor. When the body defies recognition, it demands reckoning, not depiction.

Erasure in Gaza is not only physical—it is cognitive, aesthetic, and systemic. Media silence, artistic conventions, display logic, and colonial policy form a synchronized architecture of invisibility. Victims are not silenced by blunt force, but by exclusion from interpretive frames. The language of art fails them; the politics of presentation dismiss them. This coordination does not just omit lives—it warps understanding itself. To speak of Gaza is to confront a web of deletion, where the dominant lens obstructs rather than reveals.

In the face of unfiltered brutality, conventional artistic language falls short. Aesthetic tools—form, metaphor, composition—struggle to grasp raw violence without softening or obscuring it. Instead of exposing evil, they stylize it, framing agony within codes meant for gallery walls. This is not abstraction—it is evasion. In Gaza, pain resists beautification. When atrocity refuses metaphor, art must abandon polish and technique to bear witness directly. Beauty cannot translate suffering; it can only defer it. Confrontation requires rupture, not elegance.

Reconstructing the field of vision involves more than restoring the victim’s image. Their absence goes beyond visibility—it inhabits imagination, language, and human relations. Systems of perception have erased the victim not just from sight but from meaning. Revealing violence requires transforming how we perceive, not just presenting wounded bodies. It's a structural shift that brings truth into focus. The gaze must cut through beauty and recognize what’s been excluded. Representation without this rupture risks repeating the very erasure it seeks to expose.

The spectacle of suffering risks becoming a second violence. When the victim's pain is transformed into a visual object or consumable tragedy, the audience may feel sympathy, but not solidarity. This aestheticization distances the viewer from responsibility. Emotional reaction replaces ethical response. Instead of engaging with the victim’s condition, we consume it—wrapped in imagery, detached from its cause. Such representation creates comfort in witnessing, but fails to challenge complicity. To truly ally with the victim, the gaze must refuse entertainment.

The distant and defensive viewer avoids confronting violence—not out of cruelty, but from the vulnerability of witnessing. Global audiences often retreat into denial or detachment, shielding themselves from the discomfort of complicity. The act of seeing becomes threatening, not due to the image’s brutality, but its demand for ethical presence. This evasion reflects a fragile position: a refusal to inhabit the scene with accountability. Reconstructing vision means breaking this shield, facing the rupture, and accepting the cost of proximity.

The language of victims—silence, stutter, broken words—should not be reconstructed by analytical discourse. It must enter the work as it is: fractured, raw, unresolved. These utterances are not metaphors for expression; they are documents of erasure. To refine them is to betray them. The victim’s voice, fragmented and wounded, carries truth more potent than polished commentary. Let the rupture speak for itself; it holds the trace of what was denied.

Places of violence in Gaza must not be staged as emotional backdrops. Bread lines, shattered hospitals, ruined homes—these are not sets for dramatic effect but documents of erasure. They must enter the work unframed, as sites where deletion itself has occurred. To aestheticize these spaces is to falsify them; their presence must remain raw, resisting choreography, so the audience encounters absence as fact, not spectacle, and feels its weight unmediated.

Slow death in Gaza is not accidental—it is engineered. Malnutrition and medical deprivation operate as deliberate machinery, producing deaths that are neither natural nor exceptional. Art cannot treat these as tragedies of fate; it must expose their architecture. The task is not narration but revelation: to strip away the disguise of inevitability and show the intent, the policy, the design that turns human life into a scheduled erasure.

The task of art is to resist silence without turning wounds into spectacle. It must draw the victim back from erasure while refusing to display injury so graphically that the viewer retreats. Art must hold its gaze steady—close enough to restore the victim’s place in human relation, yet careful not to convert pain into a barrier. Witness must replace voyeurism; presence must replace the safe distance of pity.

Art must rebuild the fabric of relation out of violence—not through decorative empathy, but by returning the victim to the position of a counterpart rather than an object. The work must dismantle the distance that turns a human into a scene. It is not sentiment that repairs the breach, but the refusal to let a life be only watched. To see is to stand with, not to look at.

The image of the victim must stand as an indictment, not an ornament. A starved body, a burned corpse, cannot be offered for aesthetic judgment or beautified for display. Such images belong not to the realm of taste but to the archive of accusation. They should confront the viewer as evidence—undeniable, unpolished—naming the structure that produced them, so that no gaze can escape the weight of their claim.

From collective death, the work must carve not only testimony but the outline of a human future. It cannot stop at cataloging loss; it must open the possibility of life after violence. This is not the soft promise of hope, but the hard discipline of responsibility—the demand to imagine a world rebuilt, where the dead are not forgotten and the living are bound to answer for them.

Photo: The 2025 World Press Photo of the Year shows nine-year-old Mahmoud Ajjour who was injured during an Israeli attack on Gaza City in March 2024, taken by Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times newspaper.