Ramallah – Together – On Thursday, April 18, Zawya Gallery will open the ‘I’m Still Alive’ exhibition, which consists of paintings by the artist Maysara Baroud. The artist Muhammad Sabaaneh, the artist Fouad Al-Yamani, and a group of local artists helped transfer them onto the walls of the Zawya Gallery in Ramallah.
Since he lost his home and studio in Gaza City in October, Maysara Baroud began writing his war diaries using whatever paper and pens he had access to. He never stopped drawing, ever since he lost his ‘private little world,’ the destruction that befell his home and his studio, and the loss of all his paintings, tools, and books, including the ‘life, spirit, and memories they carried.’ He documented the life of displacement and asylum, his constant movement from one place to another under brutal bombardment, the fear of loss, and the anxiety of not being able to protect loved ones under the fragile cement surfaces. ‘I draw to tell my friends that I am still alive,’ Baroud says.
Baroud published
his black-and-white blogs regularly on his social media pages, so that they became, since the beginning of the war, a continuous documentary protest exhibition with an open time limit. Given the impossibility of transferring his works for display in the second part of the occupied country, Zawya Gallery works side by side with the artist Muhammad Sabaaneh and other artists to overcome this dilemma. They cooperate to transfer Baroud’s works as they reach us in their digital form, by drawing them directly on the walls, as if they were a tool for achieving an impossible exhibition, by a Gazan artist who has been living the war for six months in all its terrifying details. Artists Baroud and Sabaneh work together to select the works and techniques for transporting them to the gallery before the works are completely wiped off the walls at the end of the exhibition, emphasizing the temporaryness of the works and the temporaryness of the plight of war, and that the nightmare of the occupation will end, as ‘it is imp
ossible for the situation to last.’
The exhibition is in solidarity with Maysara Baroud, the artists and people of Gaza, and in honor of what they went through and are going through in this bloody genocidal war.