Inside a solitary booth, a visitor is confronted with something startlingly real: a shard of missile shrapnel recovered from the Ukrainian frontline. Heavy, sharp and engineered to wound, the object is no longer a representation of violence but its physical residue. Holding it collapses the space between observer and subject, while the visitor’s own physiological signals are captured and transformed into a low-frequency soundscape. Beneath the experience runs a rhythm that cannot easily be performed or controlled: their own heartbeat.
For Ben Khelifa, that shift from witnessing to participating is crucial. In 36,000 Ways asks what happens when the body becomes part of the story, when an audience is no longer safely positioned outside the frame, but made conscious of its own physical response to what it encounters. Technology is present, but deliberately designed to disappear; what matters is not the machinery, but what remains after the encounter.
AM: In In 36,000 Ways, you move the experience of war away from images and information toward the body itself. Why was embodiment so important to you in approaching a subject as overwhelming as war?
Karim Ben Khelifa: Yes, deliberately so. I’ve spent years making journalism and documentary work built on images and information, and I’ve watched audiences grow numb to both. A missile strike becomes a data point; a photograph becomes one more frame in an endless scroll. So with this work, I bypass that channel and go straight for the body.
The images are still there, but they’re not mine anymore. They’re the ones each visitor generates for themselves, out of sensation rather than information. That shift, from receiving an image to producing one, is what breaks the numbness.
AM: At the center of the installation is an actual piece of missile shrapnel from the Ukrainian frontline. What does the physical presence of this object bring to the experience that a photograph, film, or virtual representation could not?
Karim Ben Khelifa: A photograph or a film keeps the audience at a safe distance; they’re looking at a representation. Here, you’re holding the real thing in your hand. That’s not depiction anymore, that’s contact, and the distance between representation and sensory experience collapses.
The object itself is telling: brutal, heavy, sharp on every edge, engineered specifically to maim and kill, and at the same time a product of real technical sophistication. Most people never get the chance to hold that contradiction in their hands. I think that encounter lodges in memory in a completely different way than a conventional image does. The body remembers what the eye forgets.
AM: The visitor’s physiological signals become part of the work, with their heartbeat transformed into a low-frequency soundscape. What interested you about making the audience’s own body an active element of the storytelling?
Karim Ben Khelifa: I wanted the audience inside the work, not outside it. Using non-invasive biofeedback to capture a visitor’s own heartbeat and turn it into a low auditory undercurrent reflects their emotion back to them in real time.
In a situation like In 36,000 Ways, you can’t control your heartbeat. You can compose your face, but not your pulse. That makes the feedback honest, and it makes every encounter with the piece unique to the person having it. The audience stops being a witness and, knowingly, becomes a participant.
AM: War photography has historically asked audiences to witness suffering from a distance. Do you see In 36,000 Ways as an attempt to challenge or rethink the traditional relationship between the witness and the image of war?
Karim Ben Khelifa: Absolutely. We’re fed an enormous flow of images every day, photographs, film, footage on a screen, and that flow is precisely what creates distance: we consume images faster than we can feel them.
What’s different here is that the image each visitor ends up with is one they construct themselves, in the gaps the work deliberately leaves open. That act of filling in the blanks is intimate. It draws on each person’s own history and imagination, and it puts the audience back inside the frame instead of in front of it. That’s the traditional relationship I’m trying to unsettle: the viewer safely outside, the image safely contained.
AM: Presenting this work within Venice Immersive places it alongside projects exploring the future of storytelling and technology. What do you believe immersive art can make us understand about conflict that cinema, journalism, or photography sometimes cannot?
Karim Ben Khelifa: I don’t think one medium can do what another can’t. The power of a piece of storytelling has never depended on its medium, whether that’s XR, cinema, or scenography. It depends entirely on the sensitivity of the artist, the writer, the director, or simply someone telling a story by the fire at night.
I’m medium-agnostic; I care about audience and intention. The technology in In 36,000 Ways is only there to disappear. For me, a medium is working at its best when it vanishes completely and the only thing the audience carries out is the story.
AM: Finally, how does it feel to be part of Venice this year?
Karim Ben Khelifa: It feels good to stand alongside people who build things nobody asked for yet, the ones willing to risk failure to say something true about the world we’re actually living in. Venice, for the last 10 years, has always made room for that. For a piece built around a shard of shrapnel and someone’s own heartbeat, that room matters more to me than the prestige it brings.