5centsapound:100 days of Solitude in Gaza, by Nidaa Badwan via emahomagazine[….] After the war in th

5centsapound:100 days of Solitude in Gaza, by Nidaa Badwan via emahomagazine[….] After the war in the summer of 2014, Badwan, like many artists of the new generation, turns away from the narrative of victimhood, finding her own rhetoric that is both more personal and more critical, and questioning, or even putting aside the collective or national notions. At a time when the peace process has failed, the national ideal is in dire straits and leaders have lost all credit, the artist turns inwards to her own private and artistic sphere, where she can find more hope than in most political speeches. This withdrawal and this staging of the self are not meant to serve a self-centred narrative, but on the contrary to shift this narrative and bestow upon it a dimension as original as it is universal.Nidaa Badwan‘s first photographic exhibition is not a mere nod at Gabriel García Márquez’s famous novel. It is the result of an actual, self-imposed retreat by the artist who has not left her room for over a year. Since December 19 2013, Nidaa Badwan adheres to a strict ascetic way of life in which she refuses to leave her isolation, even during the war, a time during which she stayed alone to create, while bombs were raining down on her neighbourhood of Deir Al-Balah, south of Gaza City.Nidaa Badwan composes her pictures with makeshift materials and items scavenged in her home: the vegetables her mother brought back from the market, a stool that turns now into shelves, now into a swing, or the barbed wire rolls that she uses as interior decoration… all the excuses are good enough to draw beauty from nothing and breathe humanity into things. This economy of means is the mark of “emergency art”, attesting to an actual existentialist project. As a humanist, the creator demonstrates, in line with Sartre’s words, that “each individual is a unique being who is the master not only of her actions, but also of her fate.”In the middle of a 360-square kilometres open-air prison, the artist decides to remain confined in a fistful of square metres and “find its beauty” there. By recreating a form of chosen imprisonment, the artistic and existential performance can be seen as a catharsis experience for the young artist who only dreams of “creating a new world.” “I want to turn Gaza into something beautiful, to change things.” A hundred days of solitude for Nidaa Badwan, who explores her deepest inner self to extract from it life, creativity and freedom. In her creative retreat, this “outsider girl” tells the story of a Gaza that is rebelliously beautiful. -- source link

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