Addam Yekutieli: When we have to face what we have become
In Israel, the artist Addam Yekutieli (also known as Know Hope) is a dissident. The issues raised by his multidisciplinary work—which revolve around notions of borders, apartheid, and empathy in the context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict—force Israeli society “to face what it has become.”
Iranian missiles were raining down on Tel Aviv on the day Primitiva with Addam Yekutieli, an Israeli-American artist also known as Know Hope. “Since I arrived at the studio today, I’ve already gone to the [air raid] shelter four times,” he says from the Israeli capital during the third week of the U.S.-Israel-Iran conflict, around 5:00 p.m. “It happened four more times overnight. Exhaustion leaves us feeling like zombies.” He considers himself fortunate, despite the danger, since he can access different shelters in the immediate vicinity. “Not everyone has the same levels of protection,” he notes, referring to communities of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship who, compared to the rest of Israeli territory, have fewer bomb shelters in the areas where they live.
The reference to the Palestinian reality does not arise by mere chance in the first minute of conversation with this multidisciplinary artist, who is, within Israeli society, a dissident; his career, spanning more than 20 years, is rooted in the exploration of the concepts of borders, systemic oppression and apartheid, fragility, and empathy in the context of the conflict that has permeated the Palestinian-Israeli territory for over a century. His artistic practice, centered primarily on the use of text, blends urban art and fine art; the message it conveys—poetic and philosophical—is always ambiguous, probing, and even confrontational. It invariably consists of an invitation to reflection—which is urgently needed in a territory in constant conflict.
Addam Yekutieli (b. 1986) asserts that, for the past two and a half years—since that historic day, October 7, 2023—“Israeli society has become more fundamentalist, more ultra-nationalist-Zionist,” and that this trend has intensified with the outbreak of the most recent war between the Israel-U.S. coalition and Iran. “On the streets of Tel Aviv, there are billboards with propaganda that blends religious and nationalist concepts into a strange hybrid.” Over the past two and a half years, “[Israeli] society has fallen into decline,” he observes. “Many people who were on the liberal-left spectrum have shifted further to the right. The group of people on the most radical left—and I mean radical in a positive sense—has become much smaller. Anti-war demonstrations, even the most conventional ones, were not based on solidarity with the Palestinian people.”
It is in this “extreme and violent” context that Addam Yekutieli seeks to find forms of artistic expression. “Trying to make art in the face of genocide makes everything seem trivial, detached from reality, and meaningless. That’s why I spent most of my time organizing activist initiatives and painting banners to be used in demonstrations, since those were among the few things I could do that were even minimally creative.” Gradually, banners bearing messages began to be incorporated into his artistic practice. “I began using them as a medium to create urban interventions and installations; I became interested in using the tools of activism with a different tone of voice.”
That is how his latest project, titled *The Weight of Your Words*, came to be. The result of a collaboration between Addam and Jerusalem-based British photographer Jacob Lazarus (b. 1997), the project involves creating banners with hand-painted messages and photographically documenting the moment they are placed in locations of great symbolic significance in the Palestine-Israel region. The texts inscribed on these banners—in Arabic, Hebrew, or English—are excerpts from conversations Addam had on social media in the aftermath of October 7, 2023.
“In the days that followed, anyone who posted a message on social media that wasn’t supportive or strictly focused on Israeli Jewish suffering was targeted for persecution,” recalls Yekutieli. “Those were very turbulent times in which I was the target of a great deal of hostility.” Some of the messages he chose to paint on the banners that make up the project stem from those hostile exchanges, but not all of them. “Some are the result of correspondence with friends and colleagues who were trying to make sense of what was happening. The idea was to take these conversations—understanding them as a very authentic product of that period—and place them in a specific context.”
Perhaps one of the most poignant examples in the entire project is *Two Parallel Realities*, photographed in October 2025 on Charles Clore Beach in Tel Aviv, overlooking the Gaza Strip, which lies a mere 65 kilometers away. The banner, held aloft by two people, reads “Two Parallel Realities” in English; the caption notes that on the beach—which is “crowded and lively”—the sound of bombings in Gaza can be heard in the distance. “I believe that the connection between text and context—between the phrase and the place where it is displayed—serves to highlight different types of manifestations, whether they involve annihilation, apartheid, or the erasure of history, past or present.”
While *Two Parallel Realities* refers to a process of annihilation unfolding in the present, *A Simple Acknowledgment*, photographed in December 2024 amid the ruins of a Palestinian village that was destroyed during the Nakba in 1948, reminds the viewer that this process of annihilation began many decades ago. “The Nakba never ended,” observes Yekutieli. When Jacob Lazarus photographed *When We Have to Face What We’ve Become*, the duo makes it clear that the Nakba may simply have adopted new strategies to achieve the same ends. “At the entrance to the Port of Ashdod, the site where far-right Israeli protesters attempted to prevent aid trucks from entering the Gaza Strip,” reads the caption.
The Weight of Your Words project will eventually be turned into a book. “We want to create a kind of atlas that allows readers to navigate the different areas of Palestine-Israel that we’ve covered,” explains Yekutieli. “We want the book to be like a map that unfolds and helps readers understand the geography through all these phenomena.” The project, however, is not yet complete. “We’re about two-thirds of the way there. We had scheduled many photo shoots for late February and early March.”
The war may have interrupted the process, but it hasn’t derailed our plans for the future. “We’d really like to showcase the project because we have visually rich materials that could be displayed in an installation. There are photographs and the banners themselves, which are artifacts from the photo shoots; and the book. We’re looking for partners to make the exhibition a reality.”
The son of an Israeli father and a Japanese-American mother, Addam Yekutieli was born in the state of California, in the U.S., in 1986. He moved to Israel when he was just ten years old. “I experienced a huge culture shock,” he recalls. “I didn’t grow up visiting Israel—if I did, I don’t remember it; I must have been too young. I had no connection to the place, and for many years I felt no bond with it. My interests weren’t like those of the other children, and that led me to deliberately distance myself from everyone and remain isolated in my own world.”
What led Addam, over the years, to slowly form an emotional connection with Israel—a place he continues to view as “complicated, difficult, and heavy”—was getting to know and deconstructing its political reality. “I was raised very differently from most people in Israel,” he explains. “My father was an artist dedicated to community art projects and multicultural dialogue, and I grew up participating in or accompanying him as he developed these projects in the West Bank. I spent a lot of time with Palestinians.”
For several years, Addam was unable to grasp the political or social significance of these forays beyond the “green line.” “That awareness wasn’t forced upon me; it emerged organically, naturally. I had the space to develop my own process of discovery. But the foundations were there, albeit in a more subconscious way.” He realized, however, that his experiences in his father’s company were not typical of other children. “As I grew up, I realized that I had been there, that those were the people with whom I sang and had lunch over the years. Today I understand just how radical that was.”
It was the combination of his political and artistic awakening during his youth that ultimately connected Addam emotionally to Israel. “Although I don’t identify as Israeli, I am Israeli, and that’s how others perceive me,” he notes. “As difficult and toxic as my relationship with this place may be, I have a connection to it—it was here that I lived during my formative years. But I struggle with that every day.”
Over the years, Yekutieli’s artistic work has undergone several transformations. “At first, I started creating text-based works,” he says. He soon adopted the artist name Know Hope (which contains the pun “No Hope,” thus allowing for a double meaning). Addam would then surreptitiously inscribe phrases or expressions on the walls of public spaces that established a dialogue with the location and with passersby.
“After that, in 2005 or 2006, I developed an iconography.” The murals he painted repeatedly featured slender, stylized human figures and recurring elements that took on new meanings depending on their arrangement and interaction: birds, hearts, tree trunks, white flags. “That iconography became too closely associated with me.” And it was this iconography that made him famous—perhaps even too famous. “Today, it’s almost like a past that haunts me.”
These days, he tries as much as possible to distance himself from that iconography. “My work is very different now. When it comes to a mural, I dislike the interaction that develops between the artwork and the viewer—it becomes too structured and establishes a clear hierarchy: ‘This is the piece created by the artist, and you are the viewer looking at the piece.’ I’ve always been interested in something more enigmatic, something that could raise more questions.” Words, more than graphic symbols, fulfill that function.
Addam still paints murals, but only when he feels the cause justifies it. “A few months ago, I painted a mural dedicated to Awdah Hathaleen, an important figure in the Palestinian community in the West Bank—an activist. He was murdered by an Israeli settler. There were no consequences…”
London, 2013. In a public space, Addam Yekutieli drew a white line on the ground; on opposite sides of the line, he wrote “our side” and “their side.” “People who had never seen each other before, who didn’t know one another, would walk past the installation and choose: ‘This is my side,’” the artist recalls. Gradually, more people gathered, each choosing one of the sides. “Suddenly, everyone was arguing with those on the opposite side and trying to convince others to join their side. There was nothing there: people were simply projecting their values at random.”
The project *Taking Sides* explores the concept of territory and the notion of taking a stand through the creation of a borderline. “The concepts of borders and territory have always interested me because they are very prominent in my local reality,” he explains. “I grew up feeling disdain for nations and flags, so I wanted to create a series that would challenge those concepts. I also tried to show that the borders that exist aren’t strictly national; there are invisible borders between us that separate us from other people—ethical, moral, economic, and so on.”
Addam sets up the installation in a public space—he has already done so in London, Cologne, Lyon, and Jerusalem—then steps back and observes how the public interacts with it. “What happens next is beyond my control and is authentic.”
In 2015, in the city of Cologne, Yekutieli drew the same diagram on the ground: “our side” and “their side.” “We were at the peak of the influx of Syrian refugees into Germany,” he recalls. In the image, “two people with darker skin are approached by German authorities, who ask them for identification.” “That’s why I believe that art in public spaces can be used to highlight things that already exist—and that’s better than me talking about them. I like the idea of placing an element in a space that serves as a catalyst for revealing a deeper reality.”
In 2014, a significant change took place at the very core of Addam’s work. Until then, as an artist, he had invariably drawn on universally recognizable symbols, such as “white flags, walls, and borders”; but something changed: “I felt it was time to embrace the place where I live, my position. I wanted to talk about ‘the’ flag, ‘the’ wall, ‘the’ border. I could no longer afford to use universal terms; I had to take responsibility for calling things what they are.”
A reflection of this change is evident in the project *A Body of Land*, which explores the scars etched into the bodies “of people living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.” “I wanted to create an analogy between borders and scars,” she summarizes; she wanted to explore the “similarities between the two,” to understand how both are formed and what relationship they have with the trauma or memory associated with them. He collected testimonies and now has an archive that includes handwritten letters and photographs of the scars of more than 100 people. In one of the forms the project took, Addam gave substance to the metaphor and merged the photographs of the scars with those of border landscapes into a single image.
“The project gave people the opportunity to create a manuscript about their scars. Some interesting things came out of it. It took me over a year to realize that the project had a therapeutic aspect for me.” Addam, who suffers from an autoimmune disease that often requires him to undergo surgery, has countless scars on his body. “These scars are felt in my daily life—in the way I relate to my surroundings, in how I perceive suffering, and in how I’ve always been interested in dissecting political realities from an emotional or sentimental perspective.”
Borders, like scars, are a pressing presence in Addam Yekutieli’s world. “I talk every day about the possibility of leaving Israel,” he confesses. “I’m lucky to belong to a community of activists with whom I share a common language, with whom I can and want to work. It’s a lifeline.” He says he would feel ashamed or guilty if he were to leave. “I’d feel guilty for having the privilege to leave—because some people can’t leave where they are. On the other hand, my family is here; this is the place where I feel I have a purpose and a context—after all, my work is so local…”
Know Hope feels she lives in contradiction. “It’s hard to be an artist anywhere, but it’s even harder to be a left-wing artist in Israel. All the [state] money—which also comes from my taxes—is allocated to the establishment of settlements, to ultra-Orthodox, anti-democratic, or nationalist communities. As a member of the radical left, it becomes impossible to work within the system—but I wouldn’t want to work within the system anyway. I isolated myself many years ago and suffer the consequences of explicitly standing by my values.”
