Exterritory’s Image Blockade was co-commissioned by Artis and the New Museum for “Surround Sound,” the 2015 New Museum Triennial curated by Lauren Cornell and Ryan Trecartin. The Exterritory Project was founded in 2009 by artists Ruti Sela and Maayan Amir. Their first action was to display work by Middle Eastern artists on the sails of boats located in exterritorial waters, removed from the confinement of any one national territory. Since then, Exterritory has sought to encourage practical and theoretical exploration of ideas concerning extraterritoriality in an interdisciplinary context. Sela and Amir seek to become a platform in transit, offering artists, curators, and thinkers from conflict-ridden areas an alternative conceptual and geographical sphere for artistic and discursive exchange that would bypass the laws of territory and nationality. Image Blockade explored censorship and the notion of extraterritorial images during times of violent conflict in reaction to an open letter published in September 2014 by anonymous members of the elite Israeli military intelligence unit 8200, denouncing the surveillance practices used to gather information and exert control over Palestinians.