Artist Dorgham Quraiqi was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza on March 18, in accordance with Hope and Play, a UK charity that had supported his work in Palestinian refugee camps. The Artwork Newspaper reported on Thursday that he was 28.
Hope and Play mentioned that Quraiqi’s household was additionally killed throughout the airstrike. “In Dorgham we lose an excellent colleague who at all times got here up with new concepts and knew find out how to notice them with nice enthusiasm,” the group wrote in its announcement. “A beautiful and gifted individual is not any extra.”
Quraiqi’s work had included organizing movie screenings for kids in Palestinian refugee camps. He additionally painted, exhibiting his work in venues such because the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit. That establishment is that includes his work in “This Is Not Exhibition,” which focuses on how Palestinian artists, particularly ones in Gaza, have used their artwork to protest “the ugly cruelty of the occupation that’s meant to dehumanize.”
The present is co-organized by Shababek for Modern Artwork and the Eltiqa Artwork Gallery, two up to date artwork areas that had been destroyed in airstrikes. The latter gallery participated in Documenta 15 in 2022; its actions are the topic of an exhibition now on view on the Jameel Artwork Centre in Dubai.
The sense of ruination skilled by the organizers of these artwork areas was one thing acquainted to Quraiqi, who wrote on his Instagram this yr that Israeli forces had destroyed his studio.
In his most up-to-date Instagram put up, from two weeks in the past, he wrote, “After 15 months of displacement, I returned to Gaza to seek out myself confronted with an unimaginable and really tough actuality; after the destruction of my home and workplace utterly destroyed by the Israeli military, all my artworks I used to be making ready for my first exhibition ‘Till a chair grows wings’ have disappeared beneath the rubble. These works had been greater than work; they had been part of my soul, of my goals that I’ve at all times dreamed of sharing with the recipient.”
Since 2023, different artists have additionally died in Gaza. That yr, in October, Heba Zagout and Muhammed Sami Qariqa had been killed in airstrikes. In 2024, painter Fathi Ghaben died after Israeli authorities reportedly denied him alternatives to depart Gaza to hunt medical assist.
