There’s an odd science that operates within the impeccable frame of Hamed’s piece. The cardboard background under the white matte, both of which I assume are archival-grade, brings to mind an entomologist’s display of a specimen, pinned under glass with a Linnaeusian Latin name in italics under a vernacular title. And perhaps this presentation is doing something similar to those scientific displays that collect a sample of something that needs categorization. In this case, it is a mass-produced, easily accessible (can be ordered from Amazon and other online distributors) plastic constraint. When there are more bodies that need to be restrained than there are those doing the restraining, or when there are so many wrists that need to be stilled that it is beyond the capacity of the restrainers to carry sufficient amounts of steel handcuffs, the combination of industrial production, design, and commerce aims to solve the problem.

Unlooped, the constraints appear to be plastic strips connected to a central box, and one person could potentially carry dozens without sacrificing mobility. Once looped and tightened, it becomes the burden of the person wearing them, likely around their wrists but also perhaps around their ankles, to carry the 28 grams.

The small print included in Hamed’s documentary sculpture / image points to a geography that is adjacent to the quick, extrajudicial, emergency capture of large groups of civilians: the mass grave. It specifies the site unearthed in the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis where “over 300 bodies” were found, some of which “bore signs of bound hands.” The images and accounting of the genocidal mass murder of Palestinian civilians by Israeli forces should be revolting enough for any observer with a conscience, but it’s the combination of the bodies being found in a medical compound along with evidence they were executed while bound that moves the current Israeli campaign of death into a different category of atrocity.

How do we make art about atrocity?

For most of my life, I associated the name Montezuma with “Montezuma’s Revenge,” a roller coaster at a theme park I visited as an eight-year-old and a digestive issue some tourists get when visiting regions with potable water treatment standards below what they are accustomed to. It wasn’t until much later that I learned Montezuma (or Moctezuma) was the name of two separate Aztec emperors, though it is the second Montezuma that the name most commonly refers to. That Montezuma was the last Aztec emperor, deposed and murdered, according to Indigenous sources, by the Spanish colonizers led by Hernán Cortés. That a roller coaster in Southern California would be named after a gastro-intestinal infection that disproportionately affects tourists to territories once controlled by the Aztecs is odd but not surprising given its American context. But I think Hamed’s work asks us to consider which new and future revenges our current socio-political alignments are inviting.

The work was made and operates in a location far from Khan Younnis geographically but not historically. Like how histories of the Aztec empire are learned primarily in the language of the Spanish invaders, the dominant language of this land is currently English, not Salishan. On the unceded territories of the səlilwətaɬ, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm peoples, there isn’t yet a commonly recognized avatar of revenge. There are more than enough Cortéses, though. One that might qualify is the MLA for Vancouver-Quilchena, Dallas Brodie. In March of 2025, she was kicked out of the BC Conservative caucus not for her statements that challenge the veracity of the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation’s announcement in May of 2021 that they had preliminary findings of 215 unmarked graves of children on the site of a former Indian Residential school, but for the “mocking, child-like voice [she used] to belittle testimony from former residential school students” on a podcast where she said things like “’my truth, your truth’ in a child-like ‘whining’ voice.” Brodie relied on her experience as a public defender to make a claim about truth, arguing – in an “archeology or it didn’t happen” mode – that without exhumed bodies there is no proof of interred children at the site and therefore no policies or official responses should be rooted in the preliminary findings.

The Federal government of Canada and the Provincial Government of British Columbia both recognize the presence of unmarked graves at the Kamloops Indian Residential School and at other residential schools across Canada because there are indisputable records of the abuse of children and evidence of the genocide of Indigenous peoples going back generations. Whether through Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or the federal government’s Indian Residential Schools Resolution process, or the less official but more damning report by the defrocked Anglican minister Kevin D. Annett, Hidden from history : the Canadian Holocaust : the untold story of the genocide of Aboriginal peoples by church and state in Canada (2005), the history of the nation’s residential school system’s impact on Indigenous people and their languages and cultures is well-documented and inarguable. To insist on applying a colonial legal evidentiary framework to a claim by Indigenous groups about their current and ancestral relationship to the nation is both ahistorical and drenched in bad faith. But maybe motivations become a little clearer when the fact that Dallas Brodie owns fifty million dollars-worth of property on unceded land. Or when we consider that part of the success of the BC Conservative Party’s performance in the most recent provincial election where they won 44 out of 93 seats was partly driven by the leader of the party’s fear-mongering over the usurpation of settler’s private property rights in the Haida agreement.

Which spirit of history will Dallas Brodie curse when her lands are eventually reverted to səlilwətaɬ, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, or xʷməθkʷəy̓əm control? Will it be Delgamuukw, the name of a hereditary chief of the Gitxsan people and the lead plaintiff in a landmark legal ruling from the Canada Supreme Court in 1997, one that overturned a racist decision by BC Chief Justice Allan McEachern? McEachern, admittedly hamstrung by an imagination, like Brodie’s, limited by centuries of imposed European property relations, chose to diminish the role of oral history and non-cartographic understandings of relations to land and rejected the plaintiffs’ claim of aboriginal title that was guaranteed them by King George’s 1763 Declaration as well as Canada’s Constitution. He also chose to quote Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651) in his ruling, perhaps predictably, in characterizing the lives of Indigenous people pre-contact as “nasty, brutish, and short,” implying that they lived “outside of society,” where “society” refers to early Modern Europe. Without property deeds and cadastral maps, technologies imposed on Indigenous lands by settlers, no claim to occupation or relation could be accepted. The Supreme Court of Canada, six years later, disagreed and allowed that the world existed and exists outside of ownership models.

McEachern’s language is the language of a post-genocide nation, one that was built on the successful dispossession and disenfranchisement of Indigenous peoples. The language of the Israeli government is the language of a nation mid-genocide that yearns to be what Canada, the United States, and other settler-colonial nations are currently. When Netanyahu and his cabinet henchmen refer to Palestinians as “human animals,” they are arguing in more explicit language the necropolitical point that Canada no longer needs to make: that there are populations that are encouraged to live and those that are encouraged to die. When Netanyahu and other murderous Israelis invoke Amalek, a biblical enemy of Israelites, they are purposely conflating two ancient ethnic groups to reframe Palestinians, who take their name from a different biblical enemy of Israelites, the Philistines, in order to invoke a divine order, delivered through the prophet Samuel, to “attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children, and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.”

In response to the Israeli government’s call to genocide, the language Hamed uses to describe the mass grave at Khan Younis is more journalistic than poetic, more pamphlet than philosophy, but this is how we are often forced to imagine spaces of atrocity: through photography or film, reportage, first-person accounts or NGO reports. As a result, our imaginations are also limited. Watching a Tik-Tok of someone screaming is different than hearing your neighbor or family scream. Reading about an excavation of a mass grave is different than helping to carry a corpse. Perhaps this is the strength of Hamed’s piece: a presentation of an aestheticized tool of genocide with a textual critique of its use in a format that feels comfortable. That is the atrocity of our moment, that our imaginations continue to be limited by our informational habits and we have yet to forge tools other than those of our Masters.