Kurtis makes his own claims on the Holy Land, Through intentional use of imposition of red overlays, he marks territories with his own demarcation narrative, declaring that the current configuration of territory does not carry his own perspective, thus, it needs to be re-cut in his own interpretation. Kurtis casts himself as a player in a conflict between rival definitions of legitimate territorial reality, with his own limited reach to alter dominant systems he offers his read of the arranged world. The marked images are the tools of his own takeover. The artist's markings are technical interventions that control how elements show up within a layered image. This control of visibility decides which parts stay visible and which are buried without being erased. The marked elements still exist in the structure but do not surface. The placement of these filters control appearance across different layers of the image. He plays with how the image is read.Visibility is set by a boundary that determines what is shown. By this control over meaning, he edits which elements are allowed into the field of interpretation. Furthermore, the negatives unsettle the fixed hierarchy between original and derivative. Positive and negative are twin states of visibility. The flicker between positive and negative complicates this coexistence of reversible states. These negatives are not rough drafts of his images, but doubles and equally valid versions of the same hidden structure that is made present. These photographs are not meant to be seen, it is the conditions that let seeing to occur at all.Visibility is negotiated through inversions, exposing the book as a site of instability filled with unstable material that come into being through a regime of differentiation. As preliminary research, these images lack closure. They are not yet images of anything in a resolved sense, rather, they are images moving toward something, fragments that map Kurtis' encounter with place as an unfolding, iterative negotiation, In Marked Territory, he performs and places territory as an effect. The viewer is pushed to read the book not as a final form of a definitive project, but as a spread of iterative probes and incursions into a terrain that remains unresolved. Photographs taken in East Jerusalem, West Bank and Tel Aviv by Seba Kurtis.
