How to Illustrate the Unillustrable

Home and Body as Battlefields on October 7

Abstract

This article examines illustrations created in response to the atrocities of October 7 as an immediate visual reflection on the events. These works seek to convey the magnitude of the disaster that unfolded on that Saturday, grappling with the challenge of representing extreme violence and trauma. The article analyzes works by six Israeli illustrators—Or Yogev, Ze’ev Engelmayer, Or Livneh, Tal Shetach, Keren Shpilsher, and Michel Kichka (in the order of their appearance in the article). Drawing on local and international news coverage, survivor testimonies, and videos released by Hamas terrorists, these illustrations were disseminated via the artists’ Instagram accounts and rapidly went viral. Based on an analysis of a broad corpus of images, the article identifies two ״, body ״ and ״ home ״ : central, spatially oriented and intertwined themes understood as parallel spaces—mental, social, symbolic, and national. The study further examines the illustrative strategies employed by the artists, including intertextuality, which forges connections to documentary photography and canonical works of Israeli and Western art, and processes of figural transformation, through which individuals who had been anonymous prior to that day are rendered as symbols of human suffering and universal evil. The visual analysis draws on theoretical frameworks from psychoanalysis, gender studies, and visual culture.