Art After October 7: Creation, Politics, and Resistance

The discussion will center on Patir’s recent body of work, including videos from (M)Otherland, her widely discussed installation for the Israel Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale. Moving beyond a narrow national lens, the conversation will explore how contemporary art responds to moments of rupture, war, and political pressure, and what it means to create, exhibit, and speak as an artist in the aftermath of October 7. Patir and Snyder will reflect on the politicization of culture, the tension between personal narrative and collective experience, and the boundaries between artistic agency and national agendas. The conversation will explore biopolitics and reproduction in the Middle East, demography and state power, gender and fertility politics, technology and utopian imaginaries, academic boycotts, and the often-overlooked experience of Diaspora Jewry alongside events in Israel.

Ruth Patir is a leading Israeli new-media artist and filmmaker whose work merges documentary practices with computer-generated imagery to examine biopolitics, gender, technology, and power. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the 2024 Venice Biennale, and she teaches in the Screen Arts Department at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design.

James Snyder is Director of the Jewish Museum in New York, Director Emeritus of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, and a Senior Fellow at the Middle East Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School. One of the world’s leading museum directors, he has shaped major cultural institutions at the intersection of art, history, and public life.