Ron Amir's 'Doing Time in Holot' at Israel Museum Documents Detained Refugees

A controversial exhibition at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem features Ron Amir's photographic series and video documenting the lives of 3,000 refugees from the Horn of Africa detained at Holot detention center. Amir, born in 1973 in Kibbutz Yehiam and now based in Tel Aviv, captures the daily survival strategies of Somali, Eritrean, and Sudanese asylum seekers who have been trapped since 2000 due to a fence built by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2013 along the Israel-Egypt border. The project, curated by Noam Gal, includes still shots that give sculptural quality to the refugees' makeshift camps and objects, as well as a fixed-camera video portraying their faces as time passes. Netanyahu publicly endorsed Donald Trump's U.S.-Mexico wall, tweeting approval. The exhibition highlights the precarity of refugees awaiting political asylum status.