This project originates in an intervention carried out on August 25, 2018, in Berlin, at Haus am Waldsee, as part of the collective performance The Honey Project by Shahar Markus and Nezaket Ekici. Presented as a reflection on language, culture, migration, and religion, the performance brought together thirteen participants, all migrants in Germany, each invited to write thirteen words in their mother tongue with honey on thirteen glass plates arranged in a circle. In a second phase, each participant had to lick, on each plate, a word written in another language, following the same circular movement. The setup thus sought to make the ingestion of words into a sensory metaphor for welcoming otherness, mutual understanding, and coexistence.

It was precisely this universalist promise that made the political tension embedded in the context of the performance even more acute. The initiative of the Israeli artist Shahar Markus behind such a project, only a few weeks after the Knesset passed the Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People on July 19, 2018, introduced a major contradiction. This law was widely perceived as a constitutional reaffirmation of the Jewish exclusivity of the Israeli state and as a further legal formalization of the structural inequality imposed on Palestinians and non-Jewish citizens.

This contradiction was reinforced when I came across Shahar Markus’s video Seeds (2011). In it, deminers are seen removing mines from a desert area, after which the artist, disguised as a farmer, sows seeds on the traces left by the operation. In the Israeli-Palestinian context, such imagery could not, in my view, be received as politically neutral. It inevitably called up other images: those of the army preparing a territory, followed by settlers coming to take possession of it, against a background of the erasure of Palestinians and their land.

This reading was further reinforced by the conditions under which the work circulated and was legitimized. Seeds had received support from Mifal HaPais / Israel Lottery Council for Culture and Arts, then chaired by Uzi Dayan, a former Israeli army general who later became a Likud member of parliament. In 2018, the video was also shown in the exhibition The Land of Promise at MODEM in Debrecen, Hungary, organized as a celebration of the seventieth anniversary of the State of Israel, with no mention whatsoever of the Nakba and no Palestinian artists included. In such a context, the absence of an explicit position could no longer appear neutral, but rather as a form of consent.

Faced with this gap between the discourse of reconciliation carried by The Honey Project and the political context in which it was embedded, it became clear to me that the device could not remain untouched. I therefore decided to intervene from within. Instead of writing a random word taken from the dictionary, as the protocol required, I wrote the word Palestine in the precise position that Shahar Markus would later have to lick. Informed of my intention, Ahmed Said in turn chose the word occupy.

The point was neither to destroy the performance nor to contradict it frontally, but rather to temporarily displace its logic from within, using its own rules, symbolism, and imaginary of understanding in order to introduce what it left outside the frame. Hijacking was the form; activism, the content. It is in this space of friction that When art meets activism - Hijack is situated.

The project is therefore grounded in the idea that a critical action does not necessarily need to be external or spectacular in order to be effective. It can take the form of a minimal inflection, a punctual short circuit, a symbolic displacement introduced into an existing arrangement. Rather than opposing the device from the outside, the intervention relies on its very structure in order to reveal its blind spot. It is therefore not simply a critique addressed to an artwork, but an internal requalification of its functioning.

This project also raises an ethical question. Such an intervention may be considered questionable insofar as it introduces a partial breach into the implicit contract of the collective protocol. But this contentious dimension is not a secondary effect. It is one of the central stakes of the work itself: at what point does it become necessary to disobey a consensual framework when that framework neutralizes a very real historical and political violence? When art meets activism - Hijack is situated precisely in this unstable space, where artistic intervention becomes inseparable from taking a position, and where the form of the gesture matters just as much as what it seeks to make visible.