Salma Messaoudi

I want to address the ongoing genocide in Gaza beyond what is shown in the news. After seeing countless photos and videos of babies in the NICU dying due to a lack of supplies, human beings being crushed under Israeli tanks, and children being shot dead by the Israeli Occupation Forces, I wondered how the world around me kept going on with business as usual. I hope to use realistic depictions of the situation as well as symbolic still lives to emphasize the lasting effects of the occupation such as deliberate starvation, entire families being murdered, and cities leveled to the ground.

I wanted my paintings to be fairly realistic to make my message clear and unavoidable. The horrifying images of what was and still is happening in Gaza have never left my mind. In my artworks, I felt the need to express my frustration with the dreams of Palestinian kids being shattered and abandoned, justice being broken, and the fact that leaders around the world have been allowing this to happen for seven months. After noticing the bias in the news when discussing Palestinian lives, I felt that those who had been killed were only recognized as numbers, so in my art, I aim to make their suffering more visible to a Western audience. I referenced photos by Belal Khaled and other photojournalists in Gaza in paintings 2, 3, and 6. In doing so, I hope to emphasize the direness of a genocide that is constantly being downplayed and ignored.