Pixel Remnants from the War: Tal Hagai

The exhibition Pixel Remnants from the War derives from a digital archive of images that the artist collected in an attempt to create some kind of translation of the collective traumatic experience following the war. Through a visual archive, Tal Hagai attempts to tell a personal story—an individual and intimate act that is also a collective memory. The archive expresses a process of selection: stopping moments from the flow and reconstructing them in an installation comprising oil paintings on canvas, miniatures, and wooden cubes.

The exhibition is based on images from the media, collected consistently since the war’s earliest days: photographs from the print press and live broadcasts, videos circulated on Telegram, and more. The artist’s perception of reality is fed by a “TikTok LIVE” broadcast of a kibbutz going up in flames; white pickup trucks carrying masked figures with green bandanas; aid parachutes crashing down onto a terrified crowd; families expelled on donkeys; hospitals burning with their occupants inside; and the like.

The wooden miniatures, which form part of the image archive, depict such images as the kidnapped women returning home; landscapes of Gaza in disintegration, appearing as geometric abstractions of the ruins; convoys of Palestinian refugees; and Palestinian prisoners standing in their underwear. Their small, compressed format requires us to move closer in order to view the disturbing images. Displayed together in the installation, in a long line on the wall, they resemble a narrow opening through which to glimpse the landscape and what is happening in Gaza.

Large cubes lie on the floor, each revealing a figure extracted from a scene in Gaza. Among them are a small boy, a girl without a leg, a man carrying bags of pita bread at a food distribution, a landscape with a humanitarian-aid truck, and a landscape with refugee tent camps. Through the cube—which is three-dimensional and simultaneously flat, bearing a painting—the artist attempts to encompass the landscapes or figures. Each face depicts the image from another angle, and the figure can seemingly stand within the gallery space. In this way, an image is created from a digital source and completed through the imagination, even though there is in fact no way of knowing what the figure looks like from the other side. The cube represents an attempt to overcome this gap and create something whole.

Each cube has its own subject, and together they construct an improvised childlike landscape, like children’s building blocks in kindergarten. Tal Hagai attempts to assemble an image that will convey an idea of reality during the war, with the structure and all its details gathering within it the parts that create the whole. The installation as a whole attempts to describe a process of destruction, completing the series’ overall picture in an effort to freeze a moment—a testimony to the life that existed before. Pixelated images of a particular moment that probably can no longer exist.

The overall image of the installation is completed by the series Battered Olives, whose setting is the olive groves of the West Bank, in disputed areas between Palestinian villages and settlements. These are landscape paintings of olive groves and pastoral hills, in the tradition of classical landscape painting, but within them are signs of destruction, violence, struggles over ownership, and injustice—such as a boy throwing a stone, among other images.

In a conversation between Roi Rosen and Reem Jnaim (published in the journal Tohu on February 12, 2026), Rosen refers to Tal Hagai’s work:

The paintings Tal Hagai created during the first months of the bombardment of Palestinian cities—of food trading, refugee convoys, or ruined buildings—now appear almost nostalgic, because the city, Rafah for example, is still there. This archaism adds another dimension of tragedy to the painting: it arouses an almost physical desire to stop reality then, at the moment that has passed, which was certainly horrifying, but still less horrifying than what came immediately afterward.

For Tal Hagai, painting is an act of resistance. Through it, she reconstructs the frozen documentation and attempts to bring it to life, converse with it, and find tenderness, light, and color within it. The act of painting offers her an intimate encounter with the silent, wounded landscapes of Gaza, the Judea and Samaria hills, or the Ayalon Highway. The anonymous crowd is rebuilt on the canvas like a puzzle, in search of a gaze, humanity, and closeness amid the disasters.

This is a מראש אבוד attempt to understand the world—an attempt to grasp essence, logic, and meaning amid the chaos of wartime, through the observed physical reality of bodies, objects, cans of food, the edges of trees, and fragments of gazes. In her words, the attempt to paint the war resembles above all a pursuit of a ghost. By the time the painting is complete, the figures may already have disappeared from the face of the earth, the city may be buried beneath the ruins, and all that remains is an image.

Daniela Talmor
Editing: Dr. Amit Kama