Sakir Khader — Amin Yousefi

Sakir Khader, Yawm al-Firak

Foam Magazine, Issue 67: The Test of Time
Essay, 2025

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Sakir Khader, Yawm al-Firak

What does it mean to grieve at a distance, and yet feel as though this grief is ours to hold? Sakir Khader, born in the Netherlands to a Palestinian family, constructs the conditions in which this tension becomes unavoidable. Khader lives within that distance. Travelling to the West Bank, he is one of us — an observer — among the Palestinians; returning, he is a Palestinian — a witness — living among us. He inhabits a dual space — neither fully here nor there — which uniquely positions him to give voice to what unfolds in Palestine. His images remind that we no longer see violence as something done to someone else but as ethical solicitations that arrive uninvited, collapsing space and momentarily binding us to the irreducible singularity of each life lost. As Judith Butler describes, images can break upon us each day, catching us unprepared, unshielded by abstraction. In this sense, Khader’s work does not merely bear witness to interruption, acting not merely as document or testimony, but as demand. The photographic image becomes an act of confrontation, not only with the physical world it contains, but with the living who must carry on after it. To photograph a dying child is to carry a flower, where that bridge bridges the two; the living and the dead, the language of resistance, life and loss are inseparable.

The photographs live between memory and mourning. He resists the pull of martyred iconography; instead, lingering on the lives that endured the loss: the communities, the routines, the laughter and arguments that once filled the rooms. These are images of the lives of Palestinian friends and families living through Israeli genocide. Many of them he knew. Some, he has lost. That closeness infuses every frame, not with sentiment, but with a refusal to anonymise, to lift a life into a symbol. To photograph someone you have eaten with, argued with, wept for, is not a question of access, it is a question of responsibility. It holds onto what the world tries to erase: the stubborn ordinariness of a life that was not meant to end. The image becomes a vessel for absence. Khader’s camera attends to the Palestinian families with a devotion that is neither voyeuristic nor hagiographic. Rather than a silent grief, the citizens speak and stare back. They are, in Khader’s own words, ‘not just mourning but resisting’. The familiar ethical logic of the image — that of recognition, empathy and proximity — is undone. We are moved because we cannot see ourselves in these lives, because we must sit with the impossibility of imagining what they carry...

Read the full text in Foam Magazine #67: The Test of Time.