Izhar Patkin and Artists Support WITNESS

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Izhar Patkin in his New York City home, with some of the prints from Artists Support WITNESS. Photo by Chris Bravo

In 2004, WITNESS board member Izhar Patkin was feeling useless. Not in the existential sense, but in the sense that he wanted to find a way of supporting the work of this unique organization of human rights media activists.

An Israeli artist who has been living in New York City since the late 1970s, Patkin is known as a charming and brilliant iconoclast. Working within an organization founded by rock icon and nonprofit entrepreneur Peter Gabriel, Patkin wondered how visual artists could play a larger role in WITNESS.

Artists Support WITNESS was born under the pressure to do more than fundraise. It has the ambition to promote the ideals and promise of WITNESS in a unique fashion. Not simply another venue for limited edition works, Artists Support WITNESS creates remarkable and unexpected juxtapositions of artists working in collaborative pairs on each print. The artists have to come from different countries, and no countries can be repeated.

For the first work, Patkin himself worked with the widely respected Iranian filmmaker and photographer Shirin Neshat. Their collaboration produced a photograph of two forearms—his coiled with the leather straps of the tefillin, hers inscribed with Arabic script.

The immediate success of this first project, which was published in early 2005 (and is now sold out), led to five other collaborations between artist pairs including American artist William Wegman and the Brazilian photographer Sebastian Salgado, the Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar and the Dayanita Singh of India, German-born American artist Kiki Smith with the Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang, the French artist Fabrice Hyber and the Mexican Augusto Marban, and the Hungarian Ivan Orkeny working with the Swiss artist Olaf Breuning.

In the works for release later this year is a new print combining the work of the Argentine Guillermo Kuitca and the British artist Bill Woodrow.