Between 2007 and 2010, Assaf Shoshan made three videos as part of his Waiting Territories series, presented today as a triptych. These long static shots (Shoshan calls them “filmed photographs”) all stand as allegories of an obstacle. Each in its own way lays bare some of the frontiers dividing the contemporary world. Together, they work as a non-didactic analysis of the visible and invisible barriers faced by certain minorities in the Middle East. These static shots — in which something never quite manages to happen — evoke, without pathos, the impasses faced by certain groups, but also by people in general. Shoshan makes manifest the helplessness of the weakest populations, but also questions our own, all the while, just below the surface, quietly asking how these deadlocks can be broken.

In Barrier, we see a pedestrian crossing in the town of Rehovot, a suburb of Tel Aviv. The camera is positioned on the pavement, at eye level. While city life continues in full swing, the lights change from green to red, regulating the heavy traffic. On the opposite pavement, a group of pedestrians don’t cross, can’t cross, and slowly grow and grow in number. The group becomes a crowd, a united front. These immobile people are Israel’s Ethiopian Jewish immigrants: a community often marginalised and the butt of discrimination. Through this performance, which gradually takes on the form of a demonstration (the violent act of blocking a road), Shoshan reveals the invisible barriers — social and psychological, collective and individual — faced by this community. We observe, over the course of the video, how the psychological barrier faced by the migrants becomes a physical one — impeding, in the end, the other pedestrians. What he shows is what doesn’t happen: not the movement, but the obstacle.