The Israeli occupation forces’ bullets fired at participants in the Great March of Return in Gaza has been turned into very impressive artistic work by Magdi Abu Taqiya.
His work is characterized by its mini size the artistic touch and an expressive message that saw the light by the second week of the Great March of Return.
Abu Taqiya 39 grew up drawing on the stones of the Gaza sea. He began making works of art our of wood and charcoal but his younger brother’s injury last April has constituted a quantum leap in his artistic life.
Majdi relies on bullet shrapnel given to him by those wounded at the Great March of Return or those collected by him or by friends to make paintings that represent the siege of Gaza and the suffering of the victims of the March of Return many of them were shot and killed by the occupation soldiers.
The paintings the small sculptures and the artworks are scattered over wooden shelves that are painted with the same colors used to make them reflecting a constant work and in line with raw materials (adhesive glue painting colors pencils etc.)
He notes “After making sculptures from slabs of rubble and charcoal I made the first gypsum sculpture when child Muhammad al-Durra was martyred in 2000 and stopped doing so until 2018 when my 17-year-old brother Ahmed was injured at the Great March of Return.”
The fragments of the explosive bullet that penetrated the body of Ahmed Majdi’s brother inspired making the first small sculpture. After this Majdi began making most of his artworks which he shares on his Facebook page.
In a small corner of his rented house Majdi uses a sofa and a small table to do his artworks where he spends long hours making fine specimens out of bullets giving them shape and features.
He continues as saying: “My tools are rasp lancet saw and bullets. I have made a statue of martyr Razan al-Najjar and a wheelchair of double amputee Ibrahim Abu Thuraya. I made a full painting depicting the Return March and the Rafah crossing and a painting of Palestinian women heritage.”
Majdi points out that this kind of art which is based on the use of bullets fired by Israeli soldiers sends a message that the tools of death could be turned into tools of life and expression because Palestinians in Gaza are entitled to life.
Majdi used the remnants of the Israeli occupation to make statues of old and modern household appliances of small sizes such as Babur (a traditional fire engine) a coffee machine agricultural tools and a teapot.
The statues and artworks of Majdi represented the suffering of the Palestinian people and the Israeli military aggression. He made a full painting of figures that embodies the invasion of Tel al-Hawa in in Gaza in 2008 and the Great March of Return illustrating Israeli warplanes and military bases of the occupation and the daily life at the return camps.
Abu Takiya points out that his artworks consume a lot of his time and energy noting that he spends hours imagining each piece he makes then he gets worried when he starts working on it before his artwork sees the light and shares it on Facebook.
Despite it has been weeks since he started making this rare art in Gaza which attracted local and Iraqi artists to contact him all that Majdi wishes for is finding an institution that would adopt his line of work and provide him with the necessary tools to carry on with his work.
