Dialogues

Yaqeen Yamani’s work Checking In—a collection of eighteen text messages sent to Palestinians amid an unfolding genocide—transcends sociological critique, evolving into a meditation on language as both witness and accomplice to erasure. These messages, phrased in the rhetoric of care yet hollow in their affect, invite viewers to navigate the architecture of the Symbolic Order: a structure that polices truth, conceals complicity, and transforms human suffering into ritualized performance.

Through the lens of French feminist thought, this essay explores how Yamani’s work illuminates the quiet complicities embedded in language. It reveals the mechanisms by which Western discourse enacts Abjection—the casting out—of the Palestinian subject. The critiques that Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Hélène Cixous directed at Phallogocentrism—that paternal, logic-bound tongue—resonate with the colonial narratives that continually attempt to erase Palestinian identity and pain. In this light, Checking In is not merely an artwork but an intervention—a confrontation with the ways language itself can be weaponized, sanitized, or rendered inert.

Julia Kristeva: The Rhetoric of Performance and Political Abjection
In Kristeva’s theory, Abjection names the primal force that assaults the boundaries of the self, demanding expulsion to preserve the illusion of psychic coherence. It is not a matter of filth alone, but an existential rupture—an unthinkable presence that threatens the fragile separation of “I” and “Other.”

On a geopolitical scale, the explicit acknowledgment of genocide, the affirmation of Palestinian subjectivity, and the confrontation with systemic complicity destabilize the Western Symbolic Order itself. These truths are the political abjects of our time. The brief “checking in” message operates as a defensive mechanism—a linguistic anesthetic—that allows the complicit subject to maintain distance from this disturbance. The query “How are you?”, uttered amid catastrophic erasure, functions as a shield against unbearable reality. By omitting “Palestinian” and refusing to name the violence precisely, these messages exile both subject and suffering to the margins, absolving the sender of responsibility while preserving the illusion of ethical concern.

Kristeva defines the Symbolic Order as the domain of law, custom, and language that regulates the untamed forces of the Semiotic—rhythm, emotion, instinct. Within Checking In, the language of care emerges as a symptom of this order’s collapse. Grammar and syntax remain intact, yet affective depth has been drained. The Semiotic pulse that animates authentic empathy is absent. What remains is a hollowed-out ritual: the performance of empathy without its substance, a gesture designed to maintain social composure and avert acknowledgment of moral collapse.

By collecting and exhibiting these eighteen messages—and framing them explicitly as a critique of complicity in genocide—Yamani reinjects the abjected real into the public sphere of art. The work fractures the veneer of serenity maintained by the Symbolic, forcing the viewer and the complicit subject alike to confront what had been expelled: real suffering, lived experience, and ethical accountability. This is a Semiotic rebellion, a return of the repressed, revealing the quiet power structures embedded within language.

Luce Irigaray: The Politics of Denied Difference and Critical Mimicry
Irigaray’s critique of Phallogocentrism—the patriarchal logic that recognizes only one subject, the masculine One—extends to political discourse as an indictment of the denial of difference. In Checking In, this critique is rendered vividly: the refusal to name “Palestinian” is not incidental, but central to the work’s examination of systemic erasure.

As patriarchy permits only a single gendered subject, global discourse often permits only a single narrative of power. By failing to name “Palestinian,” the messages participate in this denial, reducing a particularized struggle into abstraction. The Palestinian, as a subject defined by historical specificity and political identity, is denied recognition. This linguistic flattening transforms a complex colonial reality into a neutralized humanitarian story, where suffering is generalized and history obscured.

Irigaray theorized mimicry as an insurgent strategy: the deliberate over-performance of the role assigned by the dominant order to expose its hollowness. Yamani enacts this principle through the exhibition itself. By re-presenting these phrases of hollow empathy, the artist mirrors the language of power to reveal its emptiness. In Acts of Conflations, mimicry becomes an act of resistance: the repetition exposes the mechanisms of erasure embedded in everyday communication, transforming passive compliance into a critical intervention.

Irigaray’s emphasis on the materiality of the body resonates in Yamani’s choice of medium: text on glossy paper. This materialization transforms abstract messages into objects of presence. The gloss, the weight, and the tactile quality of the paper restore the Palestinian subject where language had imposed absence. Within the exhibition space, the texts assert themselves as objects demanding recognition, reminding viewers that language, when materialized, carries accountability.

Hélène Cixous: Reclaiming the Body’s Voice and Narrative Sovereignty
Cixous’s notion of Écriture Féminine—writing from the body, from instinct, from breath—sought to dismantle the sterile grammar of the paternal tongue. In Checking In, this principle manifests as the reclamation of the Palestinian voice, reviving a silenced narrative.

The “checking in” dispatches are echoes of a disembodied tongue, stripped of emotion and instinct. They sever the link between word and lived suffering. The sender, unwilling to inhabit another’s pain, shelters in a rhetoric of composed detachment. This mirrors the paternal tongue Cixous critiques: rational, coherent, but emptied of human resonance.

Cixous emphasizes the power of silence, the force of the unsaid. In Yamani’s work, the truth resides in what is omitted: the erased words—“Palestinian,” “genocide,” “occupation”—carry more weight than the phrases that remain. These silences are not passive voids but instruments of suppression, sustaining systemic erasure. Yamani turns these absences inside out, transforming silence into presence, and demanding that viewers acknowledge what language refuses to name.

Emerging from dialogues with Palestinians in the United States, Checking In is inherently communal. It assembles dispersed experiences into a chorus of voices, transforming individual narratives into a shared language of resistance. Through these eighteen fragments, the Palestinian lived experience becomes palpable, political, and plural—insisting upon recognition, refusing isolation, and asserting sovereignty over its own narrative.

Across the work, the interplay of silence and speech, absence and presence, reveals the ethical stakes embedded in language. By foregrounding the empty gestures of empathy, Yamani’s artwork calls attention to the ways linguistic structures maintain complicity. It demonstrates that language is never neutral: it shapes, erases, and validates, and it is within this field that resistance must operate. Checking In compels viewers to confront not only what is said, but how it is said, and what remains unspoken.

The juxtaposition of minimal material—text on paper—with maximal ethical and affective force allows the installation to operate on multiple registers simultaneously: aesthetic, linguistic, and political. The exhibition space becomes a site where the unseen machinery of erasure is revealed, where the abjected subject returns, and where the viewer is implicated in the act of witnessing.

Where Words Return: Echoes of Presence
With the simplest of tools—text and paper—Yaqeen Yamani excavates the structures of linguistic violence that silently sustain erasure. Through the lens of feminist psychoanalysis, Checking In reveals how the dominant language—the Phallogocentric Symbolic Order—erases the Palestinian subject even while claiming to convey care.

Yet the work does more than reveal: it restores. By making visible the mechanisms of complicity, Yamani brings presence, materiality, and voice back into the space where absence once prevailed. Through mimicry, through silence, and through the return of the abjected real, Checking In transforms the gallery into a space of ethical and critical engagement. Here, language itself becomes a site of reclamation, a vessel for witnessing and bearing responsibility.

The Palestinian subject, once removed and silenced, reemerges—not as abstraction, but as a living, speaking presence. In this careful return, each word, each absent word, each deliberate silence resonates. The exhibition Acts of Conflations is no longer merely a site of display; it becomes a crucible where language, presence, and witness converge. Through this act, Yamani restores not only what was lost to erasure but also the possibility of recognition, justice, and the enduring affirmation of identity.

Safoora Seyedi is a writer and researcher exploring art, literature, and memory through a feminist lens. She holds an M.A. in International and World History from Columbia University, with a thesis titled “Narrative as a Historical Document.” Seyedi contributes essays and art reviews to various journals and engages in collaborative reading projects, examining how stories and images shape collective memory.