petty politics

At the heart of Inbal Hoffman's intimate solo exhibition are her sketchbooks—pages filled with scribbles, ideas, and texts that, in her hands, become small artistic acts of quiet, marginal, and desperate resistance. Hoffman regards the process of making, and its outcomes, as a personal form of civil disobedience: an empowering act that allows her to exercise her freedom, while at the same time being demanding, difficult, and diminishing. She transfers her images onto clay using the same technique she once employed as a tattoo artist. In her hands, the strong yet brittle material replaces paper, giving the image a sense of permanence—almost eternal—while remaining something that can shatter at any moment in the process. Hoffman persistently searches for a way to preserve memory, protest, and bear witness in turbulent times of force, generals, and gunpowder. This artistic act is not passive resistance; it is a kind of vengeful bookkeeping, confronting human fragility through sensitive drawings of moments both current and imagined. These are records of extreme situations in which a fragile, vulnerable figure moves between different roles: aggressor and victim, powerful and powerless. The figure embodies the spirit of this moment, in which everyone is simultaneously guilty and a victim. Because we are at war, and in war, as in war, the news changes quickly. New horrors replace old ones, and it becomes difficult to keep track. And so she must write quickly, because the ink weeps and the clay remembers.