The Hostage Tag Project is the inaugural commission of Bridgewell Arts, presented in partnership with UJA-Federation of New York.

For more than two years, hostage tags and yellow ribbons became something rare in modern civic life: a universal visual language of solidarity, grief, and hope — worn by heads of state and schoolchildren, by celebrities and strangers on subway platforms, by anyone who refused to look away. As the final hostage returned, these symbols did not lose their meaning. They transformed from tools of advocacy into artifacts of history.

Now, UJA-Federation of New York and Bridgewell Arts invite those artifacts to speak again.

Where Light Takes Root is a monumental public installation conceived and curated by Shlomi Rabi and realized by Dede & Nitzan, the celebrated Israeli artist duo whose Kidnapped posters became one of the most recognizable and emotionally shattering acts of visual advocacy in modern memory. Just as those posters turned city walls into a global chorus of witness, this installation transforms countless donated tags and ribbons into something majestic and monumental, something visitors are to absorb rather than merely observe. Rooted in the symbolism of connection — of the invisible threads that bound a resilient people across six continents during 843 days of anguish and hope — the work invites visitors into a space where individual objects become a collective body, and where the act of standing still, of looking and being looked back at, becomes its own form of remembrance. An audio experience woven through the installation brings forward the voices of those who wore these tags: their stories, their vigils, their refusal to stop waiting.

Where Light Takes Root will be inaugurated in Manhattan, New York on October 7, 2026, the third anniversary of the day that changed us forever. Following its New York premiere, the installation will travel, with permanent acquisition by a major cultural institution as its ultimate destination.

The tags carried a prayer. Now they carry a memory.