Rumour Aesthetics

I am a shadow of something

At best,

I am a thing that

does not really

exist.

I am weightless,

a speck of time

in Gaza.

But I will remain

where I am.

                     — Mosab Abu Toha^[1]

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A voice reaches in from afar. Distorted. Someone warns about Cesium 137 – how deadly it is. The exhibition space of de Appel is coloured with an orange-tinted red, as Amsterdam’s afternoon sunlight falls through the filters covering the tall windows on the west-side of the aula (fig. 1). It is spring 2023, and we, the visitors of “After the Last Sky,” find ourselves undeniably involved with the exhibited works of Amsterdam-based Palestinian artist Inas Halabi, closing in on us.^[2] Yet her centrally positioned film, We Have Always Known the Wind’s Direction from 2019–2020, keeps us at arm’s length, presenting distant images of Palestinian landscapes, sometimes tinted the same ill-omened red that spills into the surrounding exhibition space. The scenes are interspersed with fragmented comments from a nuclear physicist whose uncanny scientific remarks about his measured radiation levels add to the mystery. Over half of the film’s 12-minute duration, what initially appeared as mundane mountain views begins to unravel, threatening layers of ecological toxification while the landscape turns an ever deeper shade of red. Still, the hallucinated film has denied the viewers the chance to grasp what we have unmistakably become a part of upon stepping through the exhibition doors. As the delivery of information is thwarted, withheld, and delayed, exactly what this nuclear threat is, where it is manifested, and how we might relate to that unsettling environment remains unclear—for now.   

Set in the environment of the West Bank, Halabi’s film is rooted in a longstanding tradition of Palestinian resistance and alternative ways of living in defiance of settler-colonialism—a system that, as Max Liboiron observes in Pollution is Colonialism, is often genocidal in character (9). Palestinians, whose loved ones, kin, and ancestors lived through, died in and survived the Nakba, have long been familiar with the cancellation of the future, as T.J. Demos suggests in his theory on the de-futured (27-31). The current genocide in Gaza evades easy conceptualisation precisely because of its repetitive nature. This is not an isolated moment of disaster, but it is instead part of a long lineage of what Rob Nixon has termed slow violence (Nixon). My essay considers the affordances of critical aesthetic praxes in this context of repetition. Here, I describe the aesthetics of absence, where the lack of explicit events can also be experienced as a form of violence, and I also question how the rumour in Halabi’s work gives form to that absence, precisely without offering a straightforward narrative. In doing this, the essay examines how art might interrogate the broader invisible infrastructure of the occupation.

The relationship between enduring political struggle and visual culture has long raised questions in the context of activist and artistic practice (McLagan and McKee). Grappling with the issue of representation in its most literal sense, Peter Weiss’s monumental historical novel The Aesthetics of Resistance is bound up with the impossibility of doing justice to the suffering of others.^[3] In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag presciently cautioned against today’s blatant anaesthetization to violence in Palestine, noting that “shock can become familiar. Shock can wear off” (82).^[4] Sontag opens the urgent question as to how art can interrogate colonial oppression and dispossession without adopting reductionist “shock” aesthetics that frame violence as just that—the local and temporal manifestations of nonlocal and enduring systematic occupation.

One alternative sensorial attention emerges from the glooming red light of “After the Last Sky,” in the slow and subtle aesthetic practice of Halabi (Palestine 1988). Her mediations demonstrate that withholding direct statements does not neutralise art’s political charge. Curated around one of the bigger threads in her oeuvre, the three works included in the exhibition, Hopscotch (The Centre of the Sun’s Radiance) from 2021, We No Longer Prefer Mountains from 2023, and We Have Always Known the Wind’s Direction, are all poignant interrogations of environmental colonialism—a theme quietly echoing from the landscape elements in their titles.

Understood from both this context and Halabi’s broader work about Israel’s occupation of Palestine, We Have Always Known the Wind’s Direction appears as an interrogation of the nuclear as yet another form of colonial violence. While the 184 Palestinian journalists killed (as of August 2025) since October 2023 make it unmistakable that we need more press and more photojournalistic evidence of the current genocide, the alternative aesthetics employed in Halabi’s work hold the complementary potential to critically engage with the veiled anti-democratic underpinnings that produce Israel’s military strategy.^[5] In the absence of shock, whispered rumours of an ominous force that lies underground do not manifest as a break but remain ongoing.

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Situating Secrets

We Have Always Known the Wind’s Direction evokes the collaborative project Don’t Follow the Wind, which was initiated by artist collective Chim-Pom and features an ongoing inaccessible exhibition situated within the irradiated Fukushima exclusion zone.^[6] Situated in this dialogue, Halabi’s title bridges her work with earlier artistic research into the imperceptible dimensions of nuclear power. We Have Always Known the Wind’s Direction extends research on catastrophic nuclear events in Chernobyl and Fukushima into the Palestinian context — a trajectory prompted by her participation in the Sharjah Biennial 13 Tamawuj Off-Site Project in Ramallah, Palestine, 2017. Invited by curator Lara Khaldi, Halabi explored how Palestinians are often deprived of both control and knowledge about what transpires on their land. The resulting series, Lions Warn of Futures Present from 2017, examined the alleged dumping of radioactive waste from Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor into the Naqab desert and its repercussions on nearby Palestinian villages and communities.

As Halabi was collecting stories and testimonies related to the burial of nuclear waste in the southern part of the West Bank during this project, she met Dr. Khalil Thabayneh. The physicist has conducted extensive research on the presence of natural and manmade radiation in the region. His findings revealed that some of these areas had high levels of the deadly radioactive isotope Cesium-137, which is the result of chemical waste and nuclear testing, commonly referred to as the “fall-out.”^[7] In 2019, Halabi returned to the same regions with her camera to create We Have Always Known the Wind’s Direction. The film’s dialogue underscores the distinctive dynamic between the artist, whose presence is subtly felt despite her position behind the camera, and Thabayneh, who revisits and contextualizes the sites of his studies (fig. 2). Further blurring the boundaries between scientific analysis and subjective interpretation, the video also incorporates prose written by Halabi and recited by the physicist. The text interweaves the diverse epistemic perspectives surrounding the alleged nuclear waste burials that Halabi uncovered through her research (fig. 3).^[8] For these perspectives, Halabi draws inspiration from stories and dreams assembled in her earlier works, which unfold in an apocalyptic vision of contemporary Palestine, addressing radioactive colonization through distinct protagonists’ experiences. 

Rumours of radioactive waste and its devastating effects on Palestinian land and life have circulated for years among the residents of the approximately thirty villages in the South Hebron Hills. Although the region is controlled by the Israeli military and Civil Administration, Palestinian scientists and allied environmental organizations have recently documented alarmingly high levels of radionuclides in local plants, soil, and water (Hall et al. 14-15). In Waste Siege, Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins contends that “the occupied West Bank is a dumpsite for Israeli waste,” including sewage, medical waste, oils, electronic waste, and even nuclear waste (5).^[9] Still, Halabi’s enigmatic work actively underscores the hearsay aspect of the waste burials. In an artist talk, she explained how she and Thabayneh deliberated on her difficulties of accessing reliable evidence (The Mosaic Room).^[10] For it is precisely the profound secrecy around information that marks the quiet tragedy of disempowerment.^[11]

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Archiving (and) Erasure 

In situating the seemingly tranquil landscapes within the context of political power and continuous control, We Have Always Known the Wind’s Direction conveys the condition of what art historian W.J.T. Mitchell describes as “semiotic features of the landscape” (17). In an interview with Subbacultcha, Halabi stated she “explores how social and political conditions of the past are inextricably linked to the present, and how colonialism manifests itself in different ways in our surrounding landscape” (Nieuwaal n.p.).^[12] The weaponization of toxic waste is no exception to how environmental colonialism, even if it is slower and less visible, can be equally destructive as immediate and spectacular violence, particularly to marginalized communities with limited resources to resist it.^[13] The film therefore engages with the discourse of nuclear colonialism, situating the development and testing of nuclear weapons, uranium mining, and radioactive waste disposal within the broader history of expropriation and displacement rooted in both internal and external forms of colonialism.^[14] In The Tainted Desert, Valerie Kuletz contends that “unofficial” maps, charting where and how marginalized peoples have been impacted by nuclearism, reveal larger patterns of deterritoriality, which manifest the diminishing commitment of the modern nation states  to particular lands or regions (7). From this perspective, settler colonialism in Palestine takes new dimensions, extending beyond militarized occupation to include the toxic occupation of space. Through the enduring presence of radiation, which persists far into the future and surpasses the lifespan of human settlers, nuclear matter itself becomes the settler. 

Halabi’s use of rumours aligns with Kuletz for piercing the veil of secrecy shrouding the zones of sacrifice, though without visualizing or mapping the corresponding Palestinian regions explicitly. On the surface level, this approach contradicts efforts by artists such as Samia Henni, for whom extensive visualization plays a crucial role in bringing together sources from classified institutional archives, providing evidence of colonial toxicity (Mavrokordopoulou 121). Yet, Halabi’s work remains deeply attuned to the fraught context of classified and erased knowledge about the Palestinian environment, which can be seen as its central focus.^[15] Despite an abundance of landscape shots, dream recitations, and dialogues, the film deliberately avoids offering a singular, coherent storyline, leaving its message fragmented and unresolved to the very end. Rather than providing numbers or statistics, it operates on the level of rumour, spinning a yarn out of speculative imaginaries. This disorienting experience—marked by the absence of crystalized truths, clear verdicts, or accountability—confronts the dark reality of living under sociopolitical conditions of environmental colonialism, where historic landscapes are constantly controlled, manipulated, and destroyed to actively erase memories. These conditions are ever present in the West Bank, where alongside a deep mistrust of their innate perceptions of the world around them, Palestinians must grapple with a relentless awareness that the very natural elements of their homeland are being weaponized against them (Shalhoub-Kevorkian 7). Leaning into the ungraspable, Halabi thus poetically archives the affect of erasure itself.

Rather than centering on the unseen radiation, the work engages with the broader implications of nuclear opacity. The notion of secrecy is no less an intrinsic dimension of the Israeli settler–colonial infrastructure than its military on-slaught. The Zionist political culture of nuclear opacity reflects the state of exception that perpetually shapes Israel’s military strategy and its treatment of Palestinians. Far from being solely imposed by the government in a top-down manner, opacity emerges as a political posture that has developed over decades alongside Israel’s nuclear program. Hence, it is as much a reflection of Israel’s internal political culture as it is of its international relations strategy (Cohen and Frankel 28). 

Nuclear secrecy is not unique to the Israeli context. The very first nuclear program was born in secrecy in the early 20^th century, after which the opacity surrounding the military use of nuclear technology was reproduced in other manifestations of the nuclear, such as uranium extraction, civil reactor accidents and, as has become evident, waste disposals.^[16] Consequently, invisible radioactivity remains similarly coated in infrastructural invisibility that is broken only intermittently, at moments of spectacular disaster.^[17] If the Israeli nuclear program that was initiated in the 1950’s aimed to reflect Prime Minister David Ben Gurion’s dual ambitions for military and techno-scientific dominance, it is mostly through maintaining this infamous secrecy of nuclear politics in which program has excelled.^[18] When there is no reliable source of knowledge, Halabi’s film reveals that not the fact, but the rumour, becomes the prevailing mode of epistemic production. 

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Rumour as Possibility 

Through stories, distortions, and reported radioactivity levels, Halabi’s film signals the dangers Palestinians face from Israeli military and intelligence agencies when exposing the detrimental presence of nuclear waste (Hall et al. 14-15). Yet, beyond representation, the work’s conditions of possibility are even more fundamentally constrained by Israel’s extensive infrastructure of secrecy and occupation.^[19] As Hanan Toukan suggests in The Politics of Art, even the very form of the incorporation of Palestinian culture into the global art market represents not a fundamental resistance to the terms of a civilizing process, but rather an extension of the post-Oslo possibility of “the right of Palestinians to be part of the universal” (199).^[20] The Sharjah Biennial, funded by the Arab Sharjah Art Foundation, reflects a unique set of political, artistic, and economic affordances and constraints for the commission of Halabi’s Lions Warn of Futures Present.^[21] Imagining the Palestinian artist’s project on Israeli nuclear radiation poisoning and the surrounding opacity successfully securing external arts funding in the United States is as difficult as envisioning After the Last Sky being exhibited in Germany. 

Adopting an immanent view of these urgent contemporary conditions, Halabi’s installation in de Appel disrupts the far-reaching infrastructure of secrecy surrounding Palestinians’ everyday grim reality. By challenging the hegemonic epistemic terrain with counter-images and rumours, she acknowledges that art forfeits its legitimacy when it asserts itself a priori to be the domain of truth. Halabi’s intervention forces the spectator to see the inherent mechanical objectivity of photography by layering the red filters over the images of the landscape, drawing attention to a myriad of possible perspectives. 

Exploiting conventional photography for its poverty to show radiation is nothing new. The superficially investigative infra-red aesthetics adopted by Halabi recall Robert Barry’s Microcurie Radiation Installation from 1969. Barry’s conceptual work consists of written text and black-and-white photographs that allegedly depict the site where the artist buried a capsule filled with barium-133, yet, of course, with nothing to show for it (fig. 5).^[22] Whereas Barry leaves the political implications of such opacity unaddressed, Halabi inscribes the seemingly apolitical representations of the tranquil landscapes with a starkly contrasting oral dimension. The film’s rumour aesthetics form an audible counterpart to the visual speculative rhetoric that is more commonly found in contemporary artworks about the dystopian political realities of both nuclear colonialisms across the world and environmental colonialism in Palestine.^[23]

Palestinian artist and intellectual Larissa Sansour argues that speculative aesthetics serve as a powerful tool to illuminate how scientific expertise and the ownership of the Israel/Palestine natural environment have been categorized, produced, and distributed over time (Moore 111). This perspective aligns with Halabi’s strategic counter to the Israeli policy of nuclear opacity as she creates a nuclear fabulation of her own. The rumour comes to function as a means to disrupt what Jasbir K. Puar, in “Will Not Let Die,” describes as “prehensive time”—the process by which the terms of the present are shaped by efforts to constrain the terms of the future (148). For Halabi, ambiguity and subjectivity create the conditions of possibility to destabilize this oppressive containment of nuclear secrecy, which seeks to align the present with one version of the future that Israel desires. Venerating neither objectivity nor fiction, she reveals that under the aesthetic regime of nuclear secrecy, rumours possess the power to subvert the oppressor’s obscuring distribution of the sensible, evoking Jacques Ranciére’s assertion in Politics of Aesthetics: “The real must be fictionalized in order to be thought” (38).

Conclusion

In Halabi’s solo exhibition, We Have Always Known the Wind’s Direction  spills seamlessly into every corner of de Appel’s red-immersed space, transforming the environment into a de-essentialized site of contingent nuclear secrecy, laden with issues of representation and conveyance. The infrastructural imprints of authoritarian control over the landscape resonate audibly in stories and dialogue. At the same time, the work stands out for refraining from visually reproducing the scenes of violence saturating the ongoing occupation. Halabi moves beyond such shock aesthetics while also transcending the maxim to “make visible the invisible.” The film proposes an alternative to artistic practices that reduce violence to isolated moments of catastrophe, but at the same time it resists ontologizing the oppressed as perpetual casualties. Addressing the far-reaching infrastructure of nuclear secrecy shrouding Israeli colonial environmentalism—which seeds a fixed future into the Palestinians’ present—means Halabi’s holistic approach becomes a way of attuning to new realities.

The work stands out in its refusal to resolve the antagonistic relationship between the visual opacity of the environment and the whispered rumours about the unseen ominous underground threat that point, yet never grab. Seeing through this opacity, Halabi knows, does not dissolve it. If the critical potential of aesthetics lies in examining the implications of critique itself as a discipline of sensible knowledge, it is precisely with the rumour that Halabi performs a critical aesthetics of spatiotemporal incommensurability that is, nevertheless, more real.^[24]

From this agnotologic focus, an explicitly activist message arises. Exhibited in Amsterdam, the work is an urgent call to act in solidarity, reminding viewers of our shared role in envisioning a just future for Palestinians. Overwhelmed by colonial legacies and witnessing ongoing systemic violence today, this message resonates deeply. Evoking Judith Butler’s view of art as a means to proceed in life, the film unsettles our habitual ways of seeing the world by opening up diverging connections, times, and perceptions (Butler 85). If those who continue to side with Israel’s infrastructure of secrecy cling tightly to the door that bars a justice-to-come, the rumour serves as a persistent reminder of an outside. 

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