21 April, 2009
Israel should realize by now that the Palestinian nation is indestructible. A nation that was born from the womb of a great civilization is hard to defeat regardless of the methods or the variety of arms used to attack them. Nothing ever will break their spirit. Israel keeps destroying and Palestinians keep rising up from the ashes, green and willing to rebuild.
Israel has bombed everything in Gaza during the latest 21 day assault including hospitals and the only museum in the Strip. But the artists of Gaza who even do not have any materials to experiment with, have been able to make their statement heard out of the rubble.
No colours were left in Gaza, no canvas or building material since the tools of arts are like food and medicine and were subjected to the cruel Israeli siege. But Gaza’s artists will never give up, they used destroyed oxygen cylinders, parts of what is left of a bed, remains of destroyed ambulances that were shelled by Israel, lab coats, a destroyed children’s swing, and burned medical gloves to create their art on the half-standing walls of the hospital destroyed by the Israeli army.
The artwork was created to commemorate the 14 doctors and paramedics killed during the attack that left the white walls of the hospital in black and grey and smelling of gun powder.
Three artists from Gaza celebrated the rebirth of Gaza. Basil Almaqusi, Shareef Sarhan, and Majid Shala are members of the modern artists school, they are a group called Shababeek (it means windows in Arabic). Life might have deserted Gaza, but art will bring it back to life through the windows of hope and art.
The artists chose to name their gallery the Rescue, and the venue was on the remains of the bombed hospital ground of the Red Crescent at Tal Elhawa south of Gaza which was destroyed last January.
The white surgical gloves and white bandages offers hints of hope on the verge of death and destruction, 14 medical lab coats were part of the exhibition, those were the coats of the doctors and paramedics who were also victims of the Israeli aggression, they were killed while stretching their hands to help those who were swinging between life and death. Israel forced its siege on everything including art materials, but this never stopped the artists of Gaza from creating art of whatever available in their destroyed city. Viva Gaza…Viva Palestine.
Source: Palestine Think Tank
Born and raised in the village of Tarsheha in the Galilee, Rana Bishara is a Palestinian Visual Artist whose creative practice includes sculpture, installation work and performance art. Her artwork functions simultaneously as an elegy to the Palestinian Nakba (the Arabic term for The Great Disaster that began in 1948), an unmasking of the brutality of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and a critique of the biased Western media’s depiction of the Palestinians’ struggle against their occupiers. The objects employed in her artwork perform as surrogates for the body and spirit of Palestine and its people. Her work, in both its physical and conceptual manifestations is an expression of the inseparable blending of the personal and political experiences that define the identity of every Palestinian.
The New Dark Age 