Dale Washkansky, Watching the Sky Fall, 2024

Watching the Sky Fall

Dale Washkansky

Front Gallery: 06.03.25 - 16.04.25

My exhibition Watching the Sky Fall (2025) is an inquiry into the visualisation of Gaza by platforms such as Google Maps and news media to explore how we can access this space in spite of the mediation of the screen. As much as the screen shows, it also conceals, however, because its surface is reflective, it can become a space for self-reflexivity, where discrete spatio-temporalities overlap ­– the here and now encountered with what is over there.  

Google Maps’ street view, despite mapping most of the world, so that users of this platform can virtually navigate almost any street, has not mapped Gaza. From the perspective of an outsider using this online platform, one is therefore presented with a space set apart and isolated from the rest of the world. Google Maps has also censored images of Gaza’s partition wall with Israel, which visually denies the fact that the space is enclosed, a bounded space where the regulation of movement in and out is highly monitored by Israel. By censoring these images, Google Maps is complicit within a larger Western representational regime that has attempted to dismiss Gaza’s isolation and imprisonment, which is a means of silencing the Palestinians, an attempt at denying their refugee status and right to national self-determination.

However, people have uploaded their own 3D photographs onto the platform. The technology that these users have access to is not as advanced, so the images often break apart. I am particularly interested in moments when the camera’s technology falters or glitches and a black hole appears in the sky. While being a point of visual obscurity, the black hole also becomes a porthole of sorts, openings that break through spatial boundaries and connects Gaza to other places and times. The sky above Gaza is highly politicised, a space used for surveillance by the Israeli state – a mechanical mobile eye is always looking down, ominous and omnipresent. Recently, it has become a space where war is waged, where Israeli bombs have been falling unrelentingly for over a year. Every day and night since 7 October 2023 the people of Gaza wait in terror for the sky to fall.

I decided to layer Polaroid images of the sky above Gaza taken from Google Maps with Polaroids taken from found documentary images, which I transferred onto glass. The majority of these images reference Israel’s recent war on Gaza following Hamas’ gruesome attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023. In responds to this attack, Israel declared its intention to eliminate Hamas, but in the process has killed thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians, driven millions of people from their homes, and reduced Gaza to rubble. For over a year I have been watching this genocidal atrocity unfold on various news channels. My artworks grapple with the meaning of this situation, of watching atrocities unfold from a safe distance of which I feel deeply implicated in.

By layering Polaroids of these documentary images behind, or occasionally above, images of the sky, they are placed at various degrees of transparency and opacity to invite attentive looking from the viewer. I deploy the Polaroid because it physically invites attentive looking, each diminutive image being a fragment of the original scene which encourages one to imagine beyond the frame, each image a unique image-object which has a more direct connection to the referent, a more direct link to having been there. The Polaroid therefore encourages us not to voyeuristically look at mediated glimpses of what was, but to take up a position of bearing witness. My process of transferring the Polaroids onto glass imbues them with a sense of material fragility and vulnerability, so that the viewer can engage with this haptic dimension and connect with the precarity of the people of Gaza. My intention is not merely to represent what has been happening in Gaza, but to present it for the viewer, whereby each viewer senses the urgency and emergency of what has been happening and is obliged to respond in their own ways. What is happening in Gaza has ramifications for us all. The very terms for what it means to be human are being put to the test.