The Book of Plunder

This book sums up my inquiries to date about the complex, fascinating relationship between the concept of “loot” and the artistic display object. For three years, I have kept returning to the question of looting, or the ownership over objects expropriated from a person, place, or foreign body and integrated into their looter’s identity.
Dealing with this issue did not result from a conscious decision, but has rather secretly crept in, like a phantom (or a sense of guilt) exposing hidden aspects of projects ostensibly long completed. Hence, even though this is an artist’s book, artworks do not stand at its center, but rather the concept of “loot” that haunts them. It is an attempt to juxtapose the works themselves as deciphering that concept, each from its own position.
However, since the works themselves are too narrow, having been made with the same artistic tools (albeit using different tactics) and by the same artist, I sought to expand and enrich the discussion. I invited four writers from several fields of thought—Elinore Darzi, Gish Amit, Kifah Abdul Halim, and Morag Kersel—who unstitch the concept of “loot” from different economic, social, and philosophical perspectives and through variegated test cases.
Although the book is published in parallel with the Looters exhibition at the Center for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv, around which the question of looting has been structured, it isn’t an exhibition catalogue, but rather an exploration of the ideational and material premise on which the show is based.