ONESTATE Embassy Art Collective
OneState Embassy
Art Collective
OneState Embassy Art Collective is a conceptual artwork that transcends conventional ideas of the state. Its vision reimagines a world where boundaries are dissolved, and humanity exists as one, united by shared values of equality and belonging. Through its multidisciplinary projects and community initiatives, the collective imagines a utopian form of citizenship—one that surpasses traditional notions of geography, nationality, and race and embraces the principle that all people are global citizens with an equal right to exist.
Practicing Political Imagination
At the heart of the collective’s work lies the power of dreams. Its members envision a future where justice and equality are foundational, where divisions dissolve, and aspirations for unity replace discord.
Founded by Palestinian and Israeli artists, OneState Embassy emerged from a profound need to dream beyond the constraints of conflict and division that shape their shared homeland. This act of dreaming through art becomes a way to explore new worlds where imagination and creativity redraw the borders that politics and history have imposed.
While deeply rooted in the Israeli-Palestinian context, OneState Embassy's vision reaches far beyond it. The collective seeks to confront global structures of power and division, offering an egalitarian perspective that invites audiences to imagine an alternate future. In a time of intensifying fragmentation and rising walls, OneState Embassy calls on all of us to envision a world where physical, ideological, and emotional borders dissolve, replaced by a shared vision of peace, equity, and common humanity. Through their art, they encourage audiences to dream, to question governing systems, and to envision a future grounded in compassion, equality, and collective identity.
Our Story
OneState Embassy was founded in 2009 as a collaboration between Palestinian artist Osama Zaatar and Israeli artist Tal Adler. Together, they realized that they personified the conflict in their very being, as artists who each represented conflicting perspectives in their daily lives. Everywhere they went, they felt like ambassadors of a shared vision for unity and inclusivity. Driven by a desire to channel this sentiment into reality, they developed an artwork that eventually evolved into a collective for artists from regions marked by war, exclusion, and inequality. This collective now functions as a space where boundaries are questioned, identities are reshaped, and a new narrative of unity is forged.
This is the first artwork of the OneState Embassy and its ambassadors, Osama Zatar and Tal Adler. In it they envisioned OneState, a country of a tight-knit community of Jews, Christian and Muslim Arabs living together in prosperity and unity. To the old footage of Jerusalem and Vienna, Osama and Tal added scenes of themselves acting as the ambassadors of the OneState Embassy. It shows the diplomats coming to Vienna, seeking financial help to build their new country. The video was shown at the Jewish Film Festival in 2009.
OneState Embassy Passport is a collective, performative artwork enacted in real time and space by the OneState Embassy Art Collectiv. Staged as a live diplomatic intervention, the work invites participants to receive a unique passport that subverts the logic of nation-states and instead proposes a civic, borderless identity rooted in shared humanity.
Each passport page features original contributions by artists from conflict and post-conflict zones, forming a plurality of responses to the structural violence of borders, inequality, and exclusion. Our intervention draws on the aesthetics of statecraft—documents, rituals, and authority only to subvert them. We imagine citizenship not as a mechanism of exclusion, but as a commitment to civil responsibility, mutual recognition, and universal equality.
As both a physical object and a political-aesthetic document, the passport becomes a site of embodied resistance. Through this live action, participants are invited to reconsider the notion of citizenship—not as a privilege reserved for the few, but as an ethical civic commitment to mutual recognition, shared responsibility, and universal equality. The passport becomes a tool for participation in a living archive of solidarity; one that refuses division and reimagines belonging beyond the nation.
The OneState Embassy Passport traverses the boundaries between the symbolic and the material, between performance and object. It offers a new space in which citizenship, art, and political imagination come together in an act of resistance and collective hope.
Artworks by: Armina Hatic, Barbara Sackl, Benjamin Ben Amotz, Daniele Mano-Bella, Deborah Lara Schaefer, Gianluca Capozzi, Heimo Zobernig, Inbal Volpo, Intizor Otaniyozova, Monika Kranich Pichler, Osama Zater, Oula Khatib, Petra Forman, Rafat Zrieq, Saad Al Ghefari, and Yonatan Auron Ophir.
To receive a personalized passport please contact us.
ON GOING EXHIBITION LAMENT
JEWISH MUSEUM VIENNA
April 13th - September 12th 2025
Photos by Caitlin Gura JMV
For nearly two years, Palestine and Israel have been engulfed in war. The full scale of destruction and loss is still unfolding, but the experience of mourning is tangible and deeply present. War is not only a political and social condition—it is also a personal and collective experience of grief and bereavement.
In both Jewish and Islamic traditions, mourning is a structured set of rituals and embodied gestures that frame and give presence to emotional responses to death and loss. It is not merely a private reaction, but a cultural practice that offers the dead a dignified farewell and the living a structured path toward healing and continuity. Expressions of mourning involve the suspension of routine, collective remembrance, and distinct physical elements—sitting or kneeling on the ground, covering the body—as well as vocal and verbal forms, such as lamentation.
Lamentation, as both a rhetorical and poetic act, employs repetition, invokes loss, and serves as a form of memorialization. It functions as a cultural mechanism that traverses the private and the public, linking individual sorrow to collective trauma. Through the body and the voice, grief is rendered visible, shared, and recognized, becoming part of the social fabric.
The sculptural work presents a kneeling figure, entirely covered in fabric—a visual gesture toward the embodied experience of grief and sorrow. This feminine form, burdened by loss, invites viewers to reconsider the relationship between body and mind, and the ways in which personal pain is entangled within broader social and historical frameworks during times of crisis.
The Audio installation features verses from the Book of Lamentations, read in Hebrew, Arabic, English, and German. This version departs from the biblical text, lamentation through a feminist, godless lens—centered not on divine judgment, but on human suffering and responsibility. Rather than seeking solace in myth or faith, the work grounds lamentation in human agency and accountability. Grief is not abstracted or universalized—it is specific, embodied, and political. It names the violence.
This framing is especially urgent in the face of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. The work insists that mourning is not separate from political responsibility. Through voice, presence, and the shared vulnerability of language, it challenges the hierarchies of remembrance and the conditions under which grief is allowed to be seen or heard.
Founders and Founding Vision
Osama Zatar, Mag. Arts. Based in Vienna, born in Ramallah, Palestine.
I am a sculptor and political artist. Masters in Art from Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Vienna. Born in occupied Palestine as a son of a three generation-long war, my childhood experiences constantly influence my themes in sculpture. My personal encounters of being caged within borders and subjected to checkpoints is a main topic within my artistic work. Being married to an Israeli woman and becoming a father to a daughter further emphasized the constant segregation that is happening between Palestinians and Israelis. Throughout my artistic career I have utilized my struggle to leave Palestine and break away from borders as a tool of communicating with my surroundings, using these incidents to speak against such forces.
The OneState project was born out of my family situation. Out of political conflicts that have deeply shaped my life, influencing my desire to save the land in which this constant conflict exists and to present idealistic solutions which do not look for what divides between us, but on the contrary what can unify us. Let´s create a more hopeful narrative!
Inbal Volpo is an interdisciplinary artist and art educator based in Vienna, also plays a central role in the collective. Originally from the Israeli settlement of Oranit, located along the Green Line Border, Inbal’s background shapes her understanding of boundaries as fluid, elusive, and politically charged. Growing up in a secular Zionist community where patriotic ideals went unquestioned, Inbal witnessed firsthand how settlements serve as tools for redefining borders and controlling narratives.
Her art, informed by her studies at both the Midrasha School of Art, Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, and Tel Aviv university reflects the inherent contradictions she sees in boundaries. Inbal challenges the idea of borders as fixed and unyielding, examining them instead as a shifting spectrum between what is finite and what defies limitation. Her work explores the paradox of borders—how they can simultaneously define and confine, affirm and erase. Through OneState Embassy, she extends this inquiry, using her art to examine the spaces between limits, encouraging audiences to question the validity and permanence of the borders that shape our lives.
Ruth Katz, Musician and Educator.
B.Mus - Rubin Academy for Music and Dance, Jerusalem.
MA and DMA (Doctor of Musial Arts) – Stanford university, California.
Based in Vienna, Born in Israel.
I was born is Jerusalem a few years after the establishment of the state, and the Palestinian Nakba. I grew up in an immigrant neighbourhood in which most houses were Palestinians’. Fortunately, our house belonged to the Franciscan Church. After the six-day-war our next-door neighbours were Palestinians. We lived like family, and even the 73’ October war did not interfere with our warm relationships. So, I know coexistence is possible.
Work: After returning to Israel from the USA I led the music department of Ironi Alef High School for the Art - Tel Aviv, one of the most prominent high schools in the country.
Besides my routine teaching duties, I have established an ongoing youth exchange program with Germany and Austria, under the title “The Triumph of the Soul.” In this program I wanted to demonstrate the importance of art for the human’s soul, as one holocaust survivors manifested, “music saved me”, and another claimed, “music and the art gave meaning to our miserable life in the Ghetto.” The program deals with the Degenerate Music, Entartete Musik, the music that was forbidden by the Nazis. The program generated dialogues and friendships among the young participants as well as among their teachers.
Political activities: Besides being a vehement demonstrator, be it in Tel Aviv or Sheick Jarach, I was a member of the women Checkpoint Watch organisation; we observed and documented the conduct in the checkpoints that dissect the West Bank and through which the Palestinians are forced to pass in their everyday lives. For some time, I was active with the Villages Group, trying to promote the establishing a Music School in the village of Salem near Nablus. I gave a talk about this experience in different platforms, the 2010 conference the International Society of Music Education, that took place in Greece was one of them.
Isabel Frey is a Yiddish singer, ethnomusicologist and political activist. In her search for a secular and politicized Jewish identity in the diaspora, she discovered the Yiddish music tradition. Frey has since become one of the leading Yiddish singers and Klezmer experts. She completed a PhD in ethnomusicology at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, where she now works as a Senior Artist at the Department of Folk Music Research and Ethnomusicology.
Born in Vienna, Isabel Frey grew up in a secular Jewish family, so her roots lie in both Austrian and Jewish culture. During a gap year in a kibbutz in Israel, she realized her Jewish identity was rooted in the diaspora rather than in Israel and became an activist against the occupation and for a just peace in Israel-Palestine. She studied liberal arts Amsterdam and continued political activism in various feminist, anti-racist and decolonial movements. It was in this context that Frey stumbled across the tradition of revolutionary Yiddish music, in which she was able to combine her Jewish identity with her political activism. After returning to Vienna after her studies, Frey performed her revolutionary Yiddish songs at both concerts and demonstrations.
She regularly performs in various ensembles both domestically and internationally, including at the Yiddish New York Festival, Singera Festival Warsaw, Willy Brandt Center Jerusalem, and the Shtetl Berlin Festival. From 2023 to 2024, she was part of the Austrian Foreign Ministry's "New Austrian Sound of Music" (NASOM) funding program.
In 2020, she released her debut album "Millenial Bundist," in 2022, the debut album of her vocal duo "Soveles" with Esther Wratschko, and in 2024 „Di Fliendike Pave" with the the New York Yiddish music label Borscht Beat. In addition to her artistic activities, Isabel Frey is also active as a curator and music mediator. She regularly teaches Yiddish music workshops at international festivals, such as KlezKanada and Yiddish Summer Weimar. Since 2024, she is the curator of the KlezMORE Festival Vienna.
Photo by Franzi Kreis
Tal Adler, Based in Berlin, Born in Israel.
I am an artist and researcher, currently working at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Heritage and Museums (CARMAH), the Humboldt University of Berlin. For the TRACES project (EU H2020, 2016-2019) I developed long term creative coproductions between artists, researchers and institutions, for creating meaningful and sustainable ways to disseminate contentious cultural heritages. For over two decades I have been developing methods of collaborative artistic research for engaging with difficult pasts and conflicted communities in Israel/Palestine and in Europe
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