“Mahsoom”

Installed in the entrance corridor of a public building, Mahsoom transforms a transitional space into an immersive threshold; one where viewers momentarily inhabit the psychological and spatial conditions faced by Palestinians at Israeli checkpoints. The term Mahsoom, borrowed from the Hebrew word for “barrier” (מחסום), has been absorbed into everyday Palestinian vocabulary to describe the architecture of control imposed by the Israeli occupation. These are not mere "checkpoints," but sites of fragmentation, surveillance, and state violence that regulate and restrict Palestinian life based on the color of one’s ID card.

The work features covertly recorded video footage of my own passage through Qalandia checkpoint, projected onto window screen-like material divided into segments that obscure and fragment the image. This physical structure mimics the visual disorientation, lack of clarity, and enforced segmentation that define the experience of moving through a Mahsoom. The layered projection intentionally destabilizes the viewer’s gaze, mirroring how Palestinians are constantly watched yet rendered invisible within the system.

The soundscape features the mechanical rhythm of checkpoint turnstiles and a disembodied voice narrating the logic of movement restrictions, echoing the bureaucratic violence and psychological pressure that marks these spaces. Together, the visual and sonic components create an atmosphere of tension, claustrophobia, and waiting, confronting the viewer not only with the geopolitical reality of occupation but also with the phenomenology of crossing.

Mahsoom asks: what does it mean to move through a space designed to break the body into parts; detained, delayed, scanned, erased?