Zainab Al-Kawlak Story

The Palestinian artist, Zainab Al-Kawlak, who survived a massacre committed by the Israeli army against her family during the last war on the Gaza Strip last May.

Through an exhibition entitled “I am 22 years old, I lost 22 people,” each painting embodies a tragic moment I lived due to the bombing, where I lost 22 members of my family, including my mother and 3 of my brothers.

And she says: “Suddenly my mother alerted me that the wall of the house had cracks (..) I could not look or think, until seconds and I found myself under the rubble, we are all under the rubble.”

She says that she spent those long hours thinking about her family members: “Which of them suffers! Who loses consciousness!”

She says that her most prominent paintings today include a drawing of her family, based on a photo taken during her brother’s graduation from university.

In her plastic painting, the artist kept some members of her family in clothes without a body.

Zainab described herself as “a corpse”, and that “removing the rubble from above her body does not mean that the (internal) rubble has been removed and that she is in good condition.”