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The Image of Everything

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Unsophisticated Weapons

A Broken Israeli Soldier

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Visit

In The Mood for War

The School of Gaza

The Image of Everything

Facing life in Ramallah

Optics and making: in conversation with Wafa Hourani

By Phoebe West

 

Learning the power of perspective

“On the 4th April this year, it was 30 years since I was shot,” he tells me. “I still have the shoes.”

It was that day in 1994 when Wafa was shot in the foot by an Israeli soldier as he walked home from school one afternoon. “With all my heart I’m with the children of Gaza. I can feel them,” he says, “not just with my heart, I can feel them with my foot!”​​

Golden Pyramid

“I am not a utopian artist,” he reminds me. “Yes, Gaza is dystopian now, it is unbelievably dark, but when you dig you see the power inside these hearts, they’re still living! And that is the utopian part. That is what I think we can do in art, you make it for the other to think about, and you want them to know that life – it’s in so many different layers – you give them space to hold them all.” 

impressionist

There came a point when Wafa couldn’t look at a military presence in his work any more, the feedback loop of destruction was exhausting. Instead, he began filling their shapes with his favourite art: flowers and colour in place of lifeless metal: impressionist havens of poppy fields and tree corridors, strewn with corpses. 

Facing life in Ramallah - Optics and making:

By Phoebe West for Shado ​​

Love. War. Bashar & You

Join us with an experimental art project.

This game is based on the science of numerology combining your name, the number of the chapter you selected and the date you sent the picture. 

 

 

Select a picture of yourself - Write your name and Select a chapter.

 

1 = Love 2 = War  3 = Bashar  4 = You

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BLACKOUT

THE ELECTRICITY CRISIS IN GAZA

Images carry a sense of becoming when they freeze a particular moment, yet the artistic element expresses itself through the disappearance of self-found within and without us, as though art was a refugee, not unlike when we seek refuge, it comes to us bearing the truth; especially when the limits of thought are enclosed by a hedge of responsibility. Is there a space beyond poetry and images where we can nurture our rights and illusions? I mean to emphasize the need for abstraction, on the one hand, inventing alternative ways to describe the life and the future of expression, and how the content of art is a science that constantly reinvents itself to describe disappearance before accessing it on the other. If this disappearance was inevitable, then let secrets find themselves a grave, and for the grave let there be a witness, testifying to the very essence of mystery and the future of disappearance. So let us bury our secrets like we bury our martyrs, thus art becomes the cemetery of things; a sacred and eternal cemetery; the viewer keeps staring at the invisible in us, only to see his own secret; he exposes it to himself, and himself alone, whilst thinking of others’ secrets.

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© 2024 Wafa Hourani

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