“Thank You For The Memories” at Beyond the Streets, NY

All of our childhood memories are somehow connected to the US: one of the first things we can remember as kids is the start of the Golf War in 1990. When the alarms would sound, our parents would put gas masks on us and we had to run to shelters. Around the same time, Israel started to broadcast shows like The Simpsons, and they were the first images that sparked our imagination, leading us to discover America’s vast visual world. We got obsessed with American illustration and graffiti, everything from The Ninja Turtles to Keith Haring.

We thought we were part of this culture, but in fact, we received a version of it filtered by political interests. When you get older, you start to realize the differences between the image of America and its reality. We started to become aware of how deeply the US was involved in what is happening in the Middle East; things that continue to affect our day-to-day lives.

In the American movies and comics we grew up on, it was always clear who the villains were. What we encounter in our post-truth, post-Zionist context is far more complicated. It’s hard to know what’s real when imagination, reality and politics are mixed in an almost associative way.