Aaron Wilder, Body4Body: May 26, 2024 / 35,984 Dead Bodies in Gaza / 35,971 Live Bodies in Texarkana, Texas, 2026, Digital Collage

July 11-August 29, 2026
Opening Reception: Saturday July 11, 6:00pm-8:00pm

 

Texarkana Regional Arts & Humanities Council
321 West 4th Street
Texarkana, TX 75501

Aaron Wilder's video Shut Up and Enjoy the Fireworks and work from his Body4Body are included in the exhibition. 

Shut Up and Enjoy the Fireworks reflects on 2026 as the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, examining how national identity is shaped through spectacle, rhetoric, and historical narrative. Layering accelerated fireworks with whispered excerpts from Executive Order 14253, Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, alongside presidential phrases, gunfire, explosions, and patriotic chants, the video immerses viewers in a collision of celebration and violence. Rather than offering a fixed interpretation, the work asks what stories are remembered, repeated, or obscured as the nation marks this milestone.

Body4Body:

On October 7, 2023, the terrorist organization Hamas led a surprise attack on Israel, killed 1,200 Israelis, and took another 251 as hostages back to Gaza. Since then, thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza have been killed either by Israeli military weapons or starvation. The United States government is arguably the staunchest and most influential ally of the Israeli government, providing political, financial, and military support, including vast amounts of offensive weapons.

Body4Body presents a comparison of the cumulative deaths in Gaza over time to the population of US cities. As the war continues and escalates, and as the humanitarian crisis in Gaza becomes more catastrophic, millions of Americans continue to peacefully live out their daily lives in the communities across the country they know as home. Fewer and fewer Gazans see the end of each day in the only place they know as home.

US cities with a population closest to the increasing cumulative death toll is looked at side-by-side with the situation in Gaza. Data on daily casualties in Gaza originate from techforpalestine.org and data on US city populations originate from US Census estimates for the most recent year: 2024.

A digital collage is constructed for each of these comparisons that includes internet-sourced promotional images of the US city, internet-sourced images from a news article about Gaza on the day the cumulative death toll in Gaza reaches the population of that paired city, and outlines of both Gaza’s and the city’s political boundaries, sourced from GoogleMaps. Images are blown up like buildings and fractured like limbs to mirror the violence visually. This project will end when the killing ends. 

Check out Aid Gaza: Tools for Actions for resources to support an end to Israel's war in Gaza.