We Bear Witness extends Shikoh’s practice into a participatory field, transforming individual emotional responses to the ongoing genocide in Gaza conducted by Israel into a shared, collective record. These images register the subtle rearrangements of American domestic life as people encounter deeply mediated violence. Every photographed object becomes a charged vessel, showing how global catastrophe seeps quietly into the textures of daily life. Each image contains a hand holding the object. That hand refuses distance. It marks proximity, complicity, tenderness, and unease all at once. Built in community, the project gently exposes how American abundance is entangled with catastrophic loss, asking what it means to hold comfort in one hand and grief in the other. In Islamic thought, witnessing (shahada) is both spiritual and ethical: to witness is to stand present before God, knowing that love, justice, and mercy are demanded by what one sees. Here, witnessing becomes a practice of staying with what hurts, honoring lives, and refusing forgetfulness.

Rather than privileging spectacle, ‘We Bear Witness’ gathers interior responses, the emotional shifts that settle into hands, rooms, and routines. The work evokes a sense of reciprocity: to recognize what we receive and to ask what we owe in return. These hands hold that question, quietly insisting that seeing carries responsibility.

PHOTO PROMPT

Photograph an object from your daily life that has changed meaning for you since becoming a witness to the genocide in Gaza, Palestine. Make sure your hand is included in the photo.  Add a short description of about your object, your first name (optional) and immigration status in the US.