A Syrian neighborhood targeted by regime bombing lies in ruins, with bodies and broken toys poking out of the rubble; tall, gray buildings are reduced to crumbling, empty shells, their walls blown away or pockmarked by the blast.
The scene, captured in devastating detail, has been created by artist Khaled Dawwa, a Syrian exile and prison survivor who now works in France.
In his colossal work entitled Here is my heart!, Dawwa is still battling oppression, urging viewers “not to forget the revolution by the Syrian people and all their sacrifices.”
Photo: AFP
“When I’m working on this piece in my studio, I’m in Damascus. I do everything I can here, while not being there,” the 36-year-old said.
Deeply scarred by the years of repressive rule and violent crackdowns, and the loss of friends killed, missing or imprisoned, Dawwa’s work is both an act of revolt and memory, targeting “the international community’s inaction against dictatorial regimes” in Syria and elsewhere.
“In the face of the disaster that is happening in Syria, I feel a responsibility because I have the tools to express myself,” he said.
Among several of his massive installations — including one in bronze — being exhibited for the first time this year in France, Here is my heart! has been on display in Paris and soon transfers to a big national museum.
Dawwa began the piece in 2018, as regime forces retook the rebel bastion of Eastern Ghouta, on Damascus’ outskirts.
At nearly 6m long and more than 2m high, it is imposing.
Using polystyrene, earth, glue and wood, covered in clay, he details the destruction inside and out — the shattered doors, blown-away balconies, right down to the overturned chairs.
In the debris, crunched-up bicycles and the wreckage of a bus can be seen — but also the bodies of a child lying next to his ball and of an old woman.
“It’s totally unique and innovative,” said philosopher Guillaume de Vaulx, of the French Institute for the Near East and coauthor of Destructiveness in Works. Essay on Contemporary Syrian Art
“Artists have shown destroyed things and made it their art, but he shows the process of destruction from within,” De Vaulx said in Beirut.
“He stops before the form has totally disappeared, but the viewer is inevitably led to imagine the moment when everything will crumble,” De Vaulx said.
Themes pitting people against authority dominate the works of Dawwa, who graduated from Damascus’ School of Fine Arts.
From the onset, he took part in the nationwide anti-government protests that began in 2011, before joining other artists and rights campaigners to set up an independent cultural center in Damascus, initiated by Syrian actor Fares Helou.
Despite police pressure, Dawwa continued to demonstrate and work at the center for three years. By 2013, he was practically the only one left there.
“My battle was to not abandon the project, otherwise it was as if we were giving up hope,” he said.
It was during that period he came to understand the impact his sculptures could have.
Posting a photograph of his work on Facebook, he was surprised to see it shared hundreds of times.
Although risky, he continued to create and post pictures, but then destroyed the sculptures “in order to leave no trace”, he says.
Then, in May 2013, he was seriously wounded in his studio by shrapnel and, on leaving hospital, jailed, spending two months in various prisons.
“There were thousands of people. Every day, at least 10 would die,” he said. “Their bodies would stay for two days next to us; no one removed them from the cell ... on purpose.”
Of the horror of the experience that still gives him nightmares, he said: “They broke the memories in my head.”
After his release, he was forced into the army, but escaped beforehand, fleeing to Lebanon, then to France in 2014 where he was granted refugee status.
His street-scene artwork is an attempt to convey “all that is no longer there; families, memories,” he said.
The Syria conflict, which broke out in 2011, has killed close to half a million people and spurred the largest conflict-induced displacement since World War II.
Veronique Pieyre de Mandiargues, a founding member of France’s Portes Ouvertes Sur l’Art association, which supports artists in exile, said Dawwa “wanted to create a fixed image of what was happening in Syria so that it remains in our memories.”
Lifting her hand to her heart, Syrian psychoanalyst Rana Alssayah, 54, also a France-based refugee, expresses her emotions on first seeing the piece.
“The magnitude of the destruction that Khaled has recreated, it’s so real... I couldn’t look at all the details inside the buildings, it was too hard,” she said.
Through this work, “he is saying the sorrow and pain that we can’t talk about, he has rebuilt our history,” she added.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
CONFIDENCE BOOSTER: ’After parkour ... you dare to do a lot of things that you think only young people can do,’ a 67-year-old parkour enthusiast said In a corner of suburban Singapore, Betty Boon vaults a guardrail, crawls underneath a slide, executes forward shoulder rolls and scales a steep slope, finishing the course to applause. “Good job,” the 69-year-old’s coach cheers. This is “geriatric parkour,” where about 20 retirees learned to tackle a series of relatively demanding exercises, building their agility and enjoying a sense of camaraderie. Boon, an upbeat grandmother, said learning parkour has aided her confidence and independence as she ages. “When you’re weak, you will be dependent on someone,” she said after sweating it out with her parkour classmates in suburban Toa Payoh,
Chinese dissident artist Gao Zhen (高兟), famous for making provocative satirical sculptures of former Chinese leader Mao Zedong (毛澤東), was tried on Monday over accusations of “defaming national heroes and martyrs,” his wife and a rights group said. Gao, 69, who was detained in 2024 during a visit from the US, faces a maximum three-year prison sentence, said his wife, Zhao Yaliang (趙雅良), and Shane Yi, a researcher at the Chinese Human Rights Defenders group which operates outside the nation. The closed-door, one-day trial took place at Sanhe City People’s Court in Hebei Province neighboring the capital, Beijing, and ended without a
‘TOXIC CLIMATE’: ‘I don’t really recognize Labour anymore... The idea that you can implement far-right ideas in order to stop the far right is nonsense,’ a protester said Tens of thousands of people on Saturday marched through central London to protest against the far right, weeks ahead of local elections and six months after Britain saw one of its largest far-right demonstrations. Organized by hundreds of civic groups, including trade unions, anti-racism campaigners and Muslim representative bodies, Saturday’s Together Alliance event was billed as the biggest in UK history to counter right-wing extremism. A separate pro-Palestinian march had also converged with the main rally. While organizers claimed 500,000 had turned out in total, the police gave a figure of about 50,000. Protesters carrying placards with slogans such as
RSS