Don’t You Know, Jake?

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

The title contains an oblique reference to an art-historical gesture: the overpainting and defacement of historic Goya prints by later artists. Here, however, this gesture is reversed. The intervention is neither an exercise in ironic distance nor an art-market game played with horror. 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 etchings by Goya 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 Jake? brings this visual tradition back into the present and asks what it means to confront the horrors of history while refusing to see the horrors unfolding now.

The exhibition also includes Yusuke Furusawa, who, in a video interview, speaks about the silent protests for Gaza he has continued since mid-October 2023. Furusawa works as a carpenter and actor; his presence does not arise from an artistic pose, but from an action repeated daily in public space. He stands alone with his placard, after work, often without visible support, laughed at, attacked, or ignored. It is precisely here that the force of this position lies: Furusawa does not turn the suffering of others into material for aesthetic valorisation, but exposes himself to a social and physical ordeal. In this sense, he does more, and acts with greater willingness to incur personal cost, than those artists who turn away from reality as soon as a clear position might endanger their visibility, marketability, or institutional compatibility, and who relieve their conscience at most through occasional gestures on social media. Furusawa’s gesture is simple, but it makes the concern of the exhibition unmistakably clear: mere knowledge of violence does not yet constitute a position, so long as no action follows from it.

Many thanks to Nana Sawada for her help!