There are exhibitions where it isn't the art itself that shakes me, but what lies behind it.

I wanted to write to you with enthusiasm about the exhibition In a Free State at Luhring Augustine in Tribeca.

Artistically, it's an interesting show: 34 works by 22 artists across painting, sculpture, photography and video, chosen by two of the most prominent figurative painters working in New York today, the Israeli Doron Langberg and the Pakistani Salman Toor. The exhibition sets out to address the collapse of trust in the contemporary world and life under the shadow of war, displacement and political crisis.

Here is how the curators describe it themselves:

"For this exhibition we drew from our close circle of friends, connected with artists we have long admired, and reached out to younger voices that excite us. We looked for works that somehow give us insight into the fraught moment we are living in, a time when the structures of trust, from the interpersonal to the political, seem to have collapsed."

Two works in the show held me in particular:

Oren Pinhassi is an Israeli sculptor who lives and works in New York. His work often deals with the human body, vulnerability, gender, architecture and ritual. He combines "hard" materials such as steel and stone with "soft" or more perishable ones, creating objects that read at once as bodies, archaeological remains or totems. Already in the title Perforated Self you can sense his ongoing concern with a body that is not whole or sealed, but permeable and vulnerable, and it fits into one of the show's central axes: the tension between armor and woundedness.

Jordan Nassar is an American artist of Jordanian descent whose work sits exactly on the seam between art, craft, identity and politics. He uses traditional embroidery (Tatreez), the Arab village needlework of the Land of Israel region, as his central raw material. The embroidery is not merely aesthetic, but a language of identity, heritage and belonging. Through it he creates imagined landscapes, places that exist in memory and in longing more than in reality, engaging with home, exile and the intergenerational transmission of culture.

I enjoyed the exhibition, and yet it was hard to ignore the elephant in the room. The choice to draw from a circle of friends takes nothing away from the quality of the works or of the selection, but it raises a curatorial question: does the exhibition widen the boundaries of the conversation, or does it mostly gather artists with similar political and cultural sensibilities, ones that lean toward liberal and progressive worldviews?

In an interview the curator Doron Langberg gave to The New York Times, he describes the war in Gaza as a turning point that forced him to engage for the first time with his Israeli identity, ties it to the memory of the Holocaust in his family, and asks how one can love one's home when the state you are connected to commits, in his words, cruel acts. But in all those words there is not a single mention of October 7, of the massacre, of the 240 hostages, or of Hamas. His framing begins from the reality in Gaza and from the Israeli response, as if the war erupted out of nowhere. And once you know that, it is hard to stand before the works without thinking about what is left outside the frame.

I have no problem with artists who take a political stance, on the contrary. Art does not exist in a vacuum, and at times an artist's role is to respond to reality, to raise questions and to challenge the society from which they work. But I do have difficulty when the moral accounting becomes partial. To speak about Gaza, about suffering and about responsibility, without October 7 and without the hostages, is no longer a whole humanist position. And what troubles me even more: it seems that the international art world rewards exactly this discourse, and that to sit at the center of the establishment, Israeli artists are expected to perform a public reckoning, but one that speaks in the language the establishment already wants to hear.

I might be wrong. But this is the feeling I left with, and so, even though this is an artistically interesting exhibition, I cannot recommend it wholeheartedly.

And still, if you are in New York, it may actually be worth going. Not only for the art, but to ask yourselves: can an exhibition that deals with war and trauma allow itself to choose which traumas enter the frame and which remain outside it? And where is the line between art, political stance and moral responsibility?

📍 In a Free State, Luhring Augustine, 17 White Street, Tribeca.
📅 June 26 to July 31, 2026