Ave Imperator

Ave Imperator places selected Palestinian accounts of bombardment, displacement, imprisonment and everyday life within altered recordings of presidents and prime ministers. Podiums, flags, microphones and the gestures of official appearances remain visible, while the speech they seem to authorise comes from people whose vulnerability is usually represented at a distance from political power.

This dissonance considers how political and media systems determine whose speech is amplified, recognised as credible or relegated to the margins, and how the silencing of victims coexists with public displays of double standards.

Although “the weapon of criticism obviously cannot replace the criticism of weapons” (Marx, 1843), it is also true that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas” (Marx and Engels, 1845).

The work was completed in 2024 in response to Israel’s war in Gaza following the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October 2023. By 31 May 2024, OCHA reported at least 36,284 Palestinians killed and 82,057 injured, citing Gaza’s Ministry of Health. Displacement and severe shortages of food, water, fuel and medical care shaped the circumstances in which the work was made.

In December 2023, South Africa brought proceedings against Israel under the Genocide Convention, alleging violations of the Convention in Gaza.

“No child in Gaza is free from fear, pain and hunger” — Ann Skelton, Chair of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, 8 February 2024.

“Real-time injustice, even of the most epic sort, is often simply not recognized as such at the time, no matter how obvious the injustice later appears. Man is hard wired to submit (adapt) to any condition and then consider it normal. Our acceptance of injustice is reinforced by the going ideology.”

Mark Ames, Going Postal (2005), p. 43.

The accounts were selected and edited from published videos, and synthetic speech and audiovisual manipulation make political figures appear to recount experiences attributed to other people. This apparent delivery is an artistic construction. Publication of a witness’s account does not establish consent to its synthetic reuse.

The dedicated artwork site documents a subsequent source reconstruction, including incomplete identifications and a correction to a witness’s age in a preserved still.

Semerdjian, Elyse. “A World Without Civilians.” Journal of Genocide Research (2024): 1–6.

Marx, Karl. Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Cambridge University Press, 1970 [1843].

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology, 1845–1846.

Ames, Mark. Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion: From Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine and Beyond (2005), p. 43.