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.

Unknown Village shows a tent in a desert. Its dark, cavernous opening reveals nothing of its interior, into which men are tirelessly swallowed, never to reappear. They arrive on foot, on donkey back; leave their mount outside, and don’t emerge again. So many men – too many, far too many for this tent — and what becomes of them we don’t know. There must be a crowd inside; there must be a whole people. This interior exodus symbolizes the disappearance of the desert nomads: a people forced to become sedentary — which, for a culture based on movement, means to disappear. Unknown Village was filmed, with the support of the nomad population, at Ramat Beka’a, one of the Bedouin villages in the Negev Desert that is not recognised by the State of Israel.