The Art Newspaper

Photo project asks: “Can you tell an Israeli and Palestinian apart?”

Olivier Suter’s “Enemies” show features lookalikes

By Lauren Gelfond Feldinger. Web only
Published online: 17 June 2009

While Suter was in Israel and Palestine in March, with financial backing from the Switzerland-based artists’ collective Charlatan, he asked Palestinians to contribute photographs for the project. The eight Palestinians who agreed were asked to sign a legal release, warning them that the photos might be exhibited together with Israeli lookalikes. Suter then published ads in Israeli newspapers with the eight photos, looking for “doubles”, without revealing the subjects’ identities.

Of the ten photos that Suter received from Israelis, one, of a six-year-old child, bore a remarkable resemblance to a five-year-old Palestinian, Adam Rantisi. However, when Suter contacted the Israeli parent, he discovered that the child, Hadas Kedar, was a girl, and that the photo had been taken in 1969.

“The families of Adam and Hadas were interested in the project and astonished but happy that their children looked so similar,” Suter told The Art Newspaper. “The problem for me was that I couldn’t make a new photo of Hadas and Adam together, as planned, because Hadas was now 46. So I had to adapt. We cut Adam’s hair to be like that of Hadas and photographed him in Jerusalem, with the same light as Hadas’s photo.”

The works will also be exhibited in Kinshasa, Congo, and Lomé, Togo, this autumn. The next stage of the “Enemies project” will be in Rwanda with Hutus and Tutsis, and in Belgium with the French and Flemish.