War Game

This contemporary visual arts project brings the ongoing presence of war to the people, the neighborhoods, the streets, through the use of toy soldiers and children's games. It aims to highlight the ongoing damage of war through an interactive and accessible artistic production based on toys and the drawings made by children who have lived through war, in the hopes of encouraging citizens all over the world to stand against war.

It was one of the days on which people decided to strike during the first Palestinian Intifada in 1987. I was sitting with my neighbors, fixing wooden pieces to play a well-known game — we called it Jews and Arabs, the same game children everywhere call policemen and thieves, except the Jew is the policeman with all the supplies and abilities, and the Arab is the Palestinian man who has nothing but his determination to free his homeland.

When I got older, the game had not changed, but the children had grown up, and the game turned real. The little child who used to play with a wooden gun now holds a real one to defend the land on which we live.

Small dummies with which children play are used to show different scenes of war through paintings drawn by children about their experience of it — soldiers, war supplies, and dummies portraying scenes from different areas, because war has one face only. What urges us to present this project is the need to work together to stop these wars that prevail across the world and kill children, women and youth.

Today, after this unbelievable war on Gaza, which has left thousands of people with no shelter and countless homes demolished, this project has become inseparable from that destruction — a work I did not plan to make in these terms, and did not expect to still be making.