For 35 years, Thai migrant workers have been employed in Israeli agriculture. Place. Work., a documentary by Nurit Aviv (1991), marks the arrival of the initial wave of workers following the First Intifada in 1989, when the Israeli government sought a solution to a labor shortage in agriculture. Since then, tens of thousands of workers have come to Israel, most of them from the Isan rural region in northeastern Thailand, to work, support their families, and improve their economic conditions in their homeland.

Although the local agriculture relies entirely on the experience and expertise of the Thai workers, within Israeli society they remain an invisible community, living in the agricultural periphery, far from urban centers. In media and everyday discourse, "the Thais” are a faceless group, lacking names or individual voices, identified by their work clothes and covered faces. The nickname "Ninjas” that stuck to them in their early years in Israel portrayed them as quiet, obedient workers with a high tolerance for hard work. As a source of cheap labor, they became a convenient replacement for Palestinian workers, another indication of the collapse of the Zionist pioneering ethos.

During the October 7 massacre and the subsequent fighting in the north, 48 Thai workers were killed, including some who were abducted and murdered in captivity. The community was involuntarily drawn into the national narrative of grief and trauma. The Israeli public, until then indifferent to their existence, recognized the victims and their relatives as part of the "mourning family”. The breakdown of barriers raised awareness of their hardships, their prolonged absence from home, families being torn between here and there, and the distress of being caught in a war that was not theirs.

The exhibition In Others’ Fields features seven Israeli artists who have built connections with the Thai labor community. Micha Kirshner’s photograph Thai Worker in the Arava (2005) points to the hardships of the unobserved Thai worker and serves as an early representation of the suffering and pain that are yet to come. Social documentary photographer Eli Atias, who has been following the Thai workers’ community for about 15 years, has created a photographic archive of their lives in Israel’s agricultural periphery. In the video work Agriculture: A Play in Three Acts, Sharon Glazberg presents a surreal Israeli-Thai performance about the transformation of the Hebrew Labor ideal.

Assaf Alkalai presents a frame from his video work Four Eyes, in which he weaves a childhood memory of "Daddy’s Thai Worker”. Liora Kuris’s close-ups portray Thai workers who were part of her family’s farm ecosystem and "vanished” as soon as their contract ended. Finally, Sharon Ramer Biel’s restless embroidered papers tell the story of Natthaporn Onkaew’s abduction into Hamas captivity and his return to his community.

In Others’ Fields reflects on the lives of Thai migrant workers who live and work on the fringes of Israeli society under a web of bureaucracy and bilateral agreements. In the exhibition, the community’s isolation brings into sharp focus the profound transformation of the Israeli labor market, which is expected to absorb hundreds of thousands of migrant workers in urban and agricultural spaces. These workers are brought to replace the Palestinian workers banned from working in Israel following October 7, and as the outcome of Israelis’ aversion to manual labor.

As is often the case with artists, those featured in this exhibition were among the first to turn their gaze toward Thai workers in Israel. Their works reflect a long-standing dialogue with this community, which has long since become an integral part of Israel’s human landscape.