Don’t You Know Jack?

The exhibition Don’t You Know Jack? brings contemporary images of war into dialogue with historical etchings by Francisco de Goya. It presents photographic works showing IDF soldiers posing with clothes, toys and personal belongings of Palestinians who have fled or been killed. The photographs have been artistically reworked: not as mere documents, but as disturbing images of a second order, in which violence, appropriation and grotesque performance overlap.

The title contains an oblique reference to an art-historical gesture: the overpainting and defacement of historic Goya prints by later artists. Yet here this gesture is turned around. The intervention is not an exercise in ironic distance or an art-market game with atrocity. Rather, it points to the moral emptiness of a present that consumes historical violence aesthetically while turning away from the violence of its own time.

Alongside the altered photographs, three original, unaltered Goya etchings are shown. They do not serve as a reverential historical backdrop, but as a silent measure. Goya’s images of violence were never merely allegories of war; they show dehumanisation, humiliation and the collapse of any civil order. Don’t You Know Jack? brings this visual tradition back into the present and asks what it means to engage with the horrors of history while refusing to see the horrors unfolding now.