It’s entitled to use this tactic – even if it’s playing dirty, because its objective is different to ours. Though the Jewish homeland truly has so much to offer, especially to the “Next Generation” – food, tech, social activism, modern dance, the list goes on and on – we cannot ignore the efforts of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement to recast all perceptions of the country in the mould of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Now, ask yourself, would they pick Israel over any other product? One of the countries they may come across as they’re walking down the aisles that span as far as the eye can see is Israel. Welcome to the Supermarket of Nations, where people from all over the world shop every day – especially on its digital format, social media. In fact, there’s an aisle for everything here. Then there are the “Real-Estate Deals”, “Business Investments”, and “Universities” aisles. You see Germany, Great Britain, and Japan’s unique styles and traits welded into the machine. But what you see is much more than the VW, Mini Cooper, or Lexus cars themselves.

The “Made-in” aisle is where you may find, out of hundreds of other products made around the world, a car, for example. Its shelves are brimming with places to visit abroad, enticing you to pick one for your next vacation. Immediately, you notice the difference: instead of the “Breakfast Cereals” aisle, you see one called “Travel Destinations”. But this supermarket isn’t like the one around the corner from where you live. Your shopping cart is empty, and the shelves are bursting with products. Architect Eyal Weizman identifies the role of the roundabout as a site of eruption in recent uprisings and revolutions in The Roundabout Revolutions from the Critical Spatial Practice series.Imagine you’re walking into a supermarket. We turn to artist Amar Kanwar’s video installation The Torn First Pages-referring to the Burmese bookshop owner who was imprisoned for tearing out pages with government propaganda in the books and journals he sold-and scholar and critic Erika Balsom’s essay on this work in Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary: The Commissions Book. Artist and researcher Sonia Boyce reconciles the aesthetic strategies of collage and montage with the political address to racism and nationalism in artworks by Rasheed Araeen and Eddie Chamber, included in The Place Is Here: The Work of Black Artists in 1980s Britain. From Conflictual Aesthetics: Artistic Activism and the Public Sphere, philosopher Oliver Marchart proposes an aesthetics of agitating, propagating, and organizing. Our series of shared excerpts continues with a fifth installment focusing on issues of democracy and protest.

Flash Blood by Joseph Hirsch