Drawing with ink pens on school notebooks, "hoping for an everlasting light," despite the constant noise of airplanes flying over Gaza and the sounds of explosions, which cause headaches, loss of concentration, and sometimes even temporary memory loss.
With my trembling hands, I try to draw without hesitation and post my sketches on social media whenever I have the opportunity. The cold blue page is beginning to ignite and grow hotter from the interaction of my friends.
My drawings are a message to the world, a scream for help.
A message to my friends that I am still well.
Friends, relatives, and neighbors have disappeared. Beautiful Gaza has been destroyed.
With simple tools, I buy them from a street vendor in Deir al-Balah. My priorities include buying groceries and paying the rent for the garage where I live, especially during wars of exploitation and high prices. There's also no place to work, the place is chaotic, and my family is crowded. These small notebooks and pens were my refuge, and I placed them in my small bag without worry, as if I were writing my memoirs daily.
Every day, a story or a tale inspires me with one or more drawings. I never planned for this to be met with the approval of my friends and for them to share my stories with them. My first drawing was of a violet flower, when I asked the good fairy to turn into a rose...
With courage, her fellow violets dared not dare to do so, based on the story of the ambitious violet by Gibran Khalil Gibran.
It is the violet that did not pay attention to betrayal and intimidation.
I did not migrate to the south at the beginning of the war, despite the extreme danger, but the occupation army arrested me when they stormed my residence in Gaza City, the southern neighborhood of Al-Rimal, and separated me from my family, forcing them to flee on foot to the city of Deir al-Balah. This was on January 18, 2023, 105 days after the war.
The soldiers interrogated me while I was handcuffed and blindfolded, and they wrote a letter in Hebrew on my forehead. The men around me whispered about the meaning of this and whether it meant the army would kill me first?!
After long hours of interrogation, they released me to walk for about seven hours as well. I arrived in the city of Deir al-Balah. The second day of searching, without any evidence or information. A call led me to my family's location.
The idea of drawing seemed ridiculous. What could I draw in such circumstances?! And why? My brain was damaged from the sound of intense bombing that still resonated in my head.
I began drawing in Deir al-Balah. It was a mission for me to release a visual store of misery I had stored in my mind. This was most brutal when I was forced to pass over the bodies of martyrs during the displacement. Overcrowding of the displaced and listening to the news on the radio at high volume, I tried to separate myself from my surroundings every morning and draw. My small, sharp, and disturbed drawings encapsulate fear and anger in a narrow notebook space.
Quick sketches because they had a sense of calm.
"Considering that artwork is produced in its context,"
it is more than just the distribution of color on empty spaces; it is a state of internal accumulation that I express as a miniature portrait of my condition, ambitions, hopes, and pain.
Sohail Salem
December 30, 2024
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Sohail Salem is a Palestinian visual artist and academic, born in Gaza, Palestine, on 8th of December, 1974. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Al-Aqsa University (1999) and is currently a professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Al-Aqsa University.
As one of the founders of Eltiqa Contemporary Art Group, Sohail has played a pivotal role in enriching the contemporary art movement in Gaza. His artistic career includes artistic residencies such as the September Summer Academy of Art at Darat al Funun in Amman (2001, 2003), Supervision of Marwan Kassab Bashi; the Place des Arts in Geneva (2005); and the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (2010).
Sohail has participated in numerous local and international exhibitions and has held four solo exhibitions. In 2014, he was the supervisor of the Contemporary Art Program at Eltiqa Gallery, making significant contributions to the development of emerging artists in Gaza.
In addition to his academic role, Sohail continues to live and work in Gaza, where he is involved in both graphic design and fine arts, exploring themes of identity, memory, and resilience through his practice. |
