Dancing the Image: Complicity, Responsibility and Spectatorship

This essay offers a close reading of Archive (2014), an hour-long performance by Israeli dancer and choreographer Arkadi Zaides, during which the artist conducts a corporeal dialogue with audio-visual documentation of human rights violations in the occupied Palestinian territories. I will point to the ways in which the work’s atypical engagement with the mediation of violence resonates Judith Butler’s thought on opaque subjectivities, collective responsibility, risk and complicity. I will further place Butler’s call for ethical responsibility in dialogue with current debates on the production, circulation, and reception of images of violence, both in the specific context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and in relation to more general conceptualizations of spectatorship.