There is something obscene in the way we consume war now. It arrives not with the weight of history or the stench of blood, but as a fleeting image on a screen, compressed between an influencer’s breakfast and a sponsored ad for the latest electric car.

The child crying in a cratered street, the amputated limb flung across rubble, the dust cloud hanging like a ghost over a flattened apartment block, all of it is real, yes. The camera does not lie. But it cannot speak. And so the context is lost, severed from the frame. What remains is a morsel of violence, served up for quick digestion by those far removed from consequence.

The viewer scrolls on. The missile strike becomes just another flicker in the endless procession of distractions. There is no weight, no continuity, no memory, just content.

We are witnessing the collapse of moral proportion. War and comedy. Atrocity and amusement. Carnage and celebrity gossip, presented side by side, as if they belong to the same register of meaning. The result is a grotesque flattening of emotion, where tragedy is no longer sacred. It is simply background noise.

Even the so-called serious press, the legacy outlets with their Ivy League correspondents and guarded syntax, have capitulated. Their words are cautious, sterile, drained of human heat. “Collateral damage.” “Kinetic strike.” “Security operation.” This is the vocabulary of those who wish to report war without feeling it. A war without agony. A death without blood.

But this detachment is not a journalistic failing alone, it is political. It is strategic. For a war that does not hurt, that does not interrupt the viewer’s comfort, is a war that can go on indefinitely.

And so the real war, its agony, its desecration, its long shadow on the living, is lost beneath the noise. The tragedy is undeniable for those who endure it. But for those who merely witness it through a glowing rectangle, it becomes unreal. Muted. Suspended in that no man’s land between spectacle and truth.

In my work, I refuse this distance. I seek to make war tangible, not through the voyeurism of suffering, but through the experience of presence. I want the viewer not to watch, but to feel. To be implicated. To recognize that this violence, while distant, is never disconnected.

Because war has many dimensions. And unless we find ways to render them—viscerally, ethically, unforgettably, we risk becoming voyeurs of ruin, untouched by the very catastrophes we allow to unfold.