Blow Up

Acrylic on Canvas | Triptych (left panel) 45x45, (center panel) 50x50, (right panel) 45x45 | 2025

In 2006, Israeli children were photographed writing messages on artillery shells—small hands, framed as innocent, writing notes like: “To Hezbollah, with love.” These shells were later fired at Lebanese towns, collapsing the distance between play and destruction, innocence and complicity. The figure of the child—whether settler or victim—is often instrumentalized as a site of moral absolutism, a vehicle for affective persuasion that casts all others as suspect. In this framework, childhood is not an apolitical category; it becomes a placeholder for narratives of rightfulness that are constructed and mobilized.

On the other hand, under settler colonialism, the childhood of the occupied is often demonized by the settler—a child is marked as suspect merely by being near a checkpoint, or imagined as unworthy of life for what they might one day become.

Blow Up engages with these tensions through three interconnected gestures: blowing a candle, blowing a kiss, and blowing a city.

In the 16th century, the word “fire” began to be used as a verb rather than only a noun. We fire a gun, fire a worker, fire a city. The very language of ignition carries both the violence of destruction and expulsion. Blow Up examines how innocence is weaponized, aestheticized, and deployed as a necessary means for ideological and theological imperatives.