'Always a Waiting Market' is a video montage that traces the afterlives of American consumer culture as it travels into landscapes devastated by American empire. It is a world of doubles, where imperial war is reframed as benevolence, where forced displacement becomes a humanitarian cause, and where extracted wealth returns in the form of aid. The cheerful language of American canned food commercials — Chicken of the Sea tuna fish and the nutrition diet drink Sego— is set against the horror of the distant markets to which these products are ultimately destined: camps of forcibly displaced Palestinian refugees in the aftermath of the 1967 war.
Drawing on archival footage, the work reflects on the unsettling proximity between relief and violence, consumption and dispossession. Humanitarian objects emerge not simply as instruments of care, but as part of the very infrastructures through which siege, dependency, and imperial power are maintained.