Damascus-SANA
On the morning of Thursday, February 21, 2013, while the people of Damascus were heading to their work and schools, a terrorist suicide bombing occurred in the Mazraa neighborhood, resulting in the death of dozens of children and civilians.
The traces of this heinous crime remain the memory of the martyrs and the shrapnel of the bomb that exploded and claimed the lives of innocent people to remind us of what this crazy war did to us.
The fragment that the sculptor Hisham Al-Maleeh picked up from Al-Thawra Street days after the bombing, he kept it all these years to find in the establishment of his first solo exhibition, which will open in Zawaya Gallery the day after tomorrow, an opportunity to present it to the public and through which he recalls the memory of that painful day.
“I did not change anything in this fragment, but I sprinkled some water on it to cause some rust,” the sculptor Al-Maleeh says to SANA Culture, adding, “To remember this crime in the form of a work of art, not to be sad and depressed, but to be more determined to protect and preserve our country, so that these tragedies are not repeated and let’s move on. On the path of life away from despair.”
Al-Maleeh was at his workplace at the Mumtaz Al-Bahra Center for Fine Arts when that terrorist bombing occurred, and he was horrified to see young children with blood on their bras running away crying and frightened, so he greeted them and calmed them down.
Al-Malih refuses to give this shrapnel a name despite the suggestion that it be called the killer, because he finds this iron mass, which is half a cm thick, rigid and without a soul or a mind, but it is a deaf tool in the hands of the one who made it a means of killing without discrimination.
Al-Malih placed this fragment, which took an abstract shape, on a pyramidal base and allowed it to move in all directions so that the beholder could see it however he wanted, but the shape of the open mouth and the sharp, narrow eyes that formed after the detonation of the bomb appear visible wherever one stands in front of it.