When produced within a colonial context the politics of art is often couched within the language of identity; that is, art produced by the colonized is most commonly understood as a resource for representing a repressed cultural and national identity in the face of historical and ongoing domination. Where are we to locate the politics of art, however, when such identities are specifically that which is being disavowed? Starting from the proposition that the matrix of Israeli colonial power is constituted through a regime of identification organized around a particular spatiotemporal configuration of sensible experience, that is, an arrangement of what can and cannot be seen, heard, thought, said, done, I consider how the productions of Palestinian contemporary artists are contesting this regime through an aesthetic rupturing of this sensible experience. My analysis considers the strategies by which these artists are suspending, deferring and interrupting what is visible, audible, thinkable, sayable and doable without representing or asserting a cultural or national counter-identity in return. Based on ethnographic research carried out between 2009 and 2011, I first focus on a close reading of the practices and works of three Palestinian contemporary artists and their works – Michael Halak (hyperrealist painting), Nardeen Srouji (sculpture/installation) and Sharif Waked (video) – as polemical stagings of the colonial figure of the “present absentee,” a figure conspicuously out of place and out of time. This is followed by an exploration of how aesthetics in this context can thus be interpreted as a practice of politics understood as the disruption of the relation between a colonial sensible experience and artistic production. These considerations, I argue, impel us to rethink the relationship between aesthetics and politics in Palestinian contemporary art in Israel outside of the binary of resistance/collusion in which art remains either at the service of a given Palestinian national ideology or is discredited by its complicity with an Israeli colonial logic.