Foreword

The current issue of Tohu addresses the divided, fragmented body. The starting point for the various articles is that the body is a living, vulnerable, and changing boundary, but it is also a legal, economic, and political object, and above all, a traded commodity. In an era of ongoing wars, the body is not only a subject of violence or a witness to it but also an object of trade and regulation: a unit of value within economic systems, mechanisms of power, and discourses of rights and morality. The contemporary body is no longer alive or dead, no longer governed exclusively by law or Sharia, no longer whole but a manifestation of its parts. The body marks the place where boundaries are blurred but also violently enforced.

The articles in this issue examine how art, imagery, and writing deal with war economies based on the trade in bodies, identities, and memories. These are critical readings of artistic practices, historical and contemporary, as spaces where the politics of the body, its organs, and their circulation within existing systems of power and control are exposed.

Michal B. Ron examines the economies of participation and sympathy through exhibitions she saw in Berlin, asking how gestures of artistic involvement (marking, cutting, folding, or "liking") are absorbed into war economies rather than resist it.

Reem Ghanayem talks with Roee Rosen about the body as a surface for political expression, through real and imagined tattoos, and studies the complexity of the connection between image and action and the way in which artistic representations may carry ethical responsibility.

Amir Nassar goes back to the classics of war photography and questions the limits of testimony and empathy in an era of image overload, where visual shock may replace moral action.

Matt Hanson, in his essay on Fatoş Irwen, traces her works, which focus on the Kurdish woman's body and its subjection to surveillance, imprisonment, and state violence. He shows how her artistic actions with body parts and materials articulate survival and resistance from within.

Samah Shehadeh presents a collection of works that together form a digital exhibition. In her works, the Palestinian female body is a charged space of memory, erasure, and silent resistance. Her drawing is a political act, limited in its means but persistent and ongoing.

The articles, interviews, and visual contributions, published here in the magazine's three languages, broaden the contemporary discussion of the body through its parts. At a time when war produces an unimaginable routine of trading in bodies - both living and dead - the issue "Organs" lingers on the seam: the place where the dismantled body is not only an object to be managed, traded, and administered, but also a site of refusal, testimony, and rethinking humanity.