From the besieged Gaza Strip, Palestinian painters managed to send their works to the Jordanian capital Amman to recount in an exhibition the devastating war that has been raging in the Palestinian territory for more than a year.
For six months, anonymous smugglers transported the paintings in small batches, crossing the Rafah border post with Egypt — closed last May after Israel took control of it — to Jordan, where they are now on display until the end of the year at the Darat al Funun gallery.
Mohammad Shaqdih, deputy director of the gallery, explains that each exhibition, entitled “Under Fire”, “tells the story of the daily war and the difficult days experienced by these artists displaced by the war”.
The paintings are signed by four Palestinian artists: Basel al-Maqousi, Majed Chala, Raed Issa and Souhail Salem, whose works were already familiar to visitors to Darat al Funun before the war triggered on October 7, 2023 by the unprecedented attack of Palestinian movement Hamas on Israeli territory.
If their works were able to leave Gaza, they are still stuck in the narrow strip of land besieged by Israel, where the war has left more than 43,500 dead, mostly civilians, according to the Hamas Ministry of Health, and caused a disaster. humanitarian.
To send their messages, they wrote letters attached to their creations.
– “Love in times of war” –
Basel al-Maqousi thus describes his paintings, like the one representing an amputee child, as “pieces of our bodies scattered with the shards of bombs”.
“These are our cries, our suffering (…) the smiles of our children who disappeared with their schools. It is love in times of war, the fear of death, of the loss of loved ones and of the unknown “, he writes.
In a message accompanying the drawing of a man hugging his wife amid the destruction, Majed Chala describes “scenes reminiscent of what our parents told us about the Nakba of 1948”, the forced departure of Palestinians from their lands during the creation of the State of Israel.
“But what is happening today is ten times more serious,” adds this artist who recounts having been displaced from the north of the Gaza Strip to the south, after losing his house, his workshop and his 30-year-old works. .
– “Universal language” –
“These simple pages (…) bear witness to poignant moments of the war in Gaza,” writes Souhail Salem, whose works were drawn with ballpoint pens in notebooks.
The exhibition brings together 79 works made with makeshift materials such as medicine packaging or natural pigments such as hibiscus, pomegranate or tea.
They represent people under bombardment, displaced people on donkey carts, tents, tired faces, emaciated children, or handcuffed men surrounded by military vehicles.
“The language of art is universal. We try, through these paintings, to send to the world our voice, our cries, our tears and our nightmares,” confides Bassel al-Maqousi, 53, from Gaza, contacted by ‘AFP.
Among the visitors to the exhibition, Victoria Dabdoub, 37, architect, seems moved.
“It is important that such works are exhibited all over the world so that people can feel the suffering (…) of the people of Gaza,” she said.
Nearby, on the letter sent by the artist Raed Issa and hung on a wall, we can read: “the bombings and the terror do not stop night or day! Gaza is sad and awaits divine help.”
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© Agence France-Presse
