Artist paints ballerinas to show Gaza women’s plight
GAZA: Palestinian artist Abeer Jebril's dark-coloured paintings show ballerinas chained in barbed wire, dancing on rocks, or facing barricades to mirror what she calls the "ticking bomb" reality of women in Gaza.
She hopes her portraits will bring attention to the social and political problems women face in Gaza, home to two million people and devastated by wars and economic restrictions.
The artist said her work also depicts restrictions that women face within the family and the community in Gaza, a traditionally conservative territory ruled by the Hamas group since 2007.
POWERFUL
Inspired by Edgar Degas, a French Impressionist artist, Ms Jebril said a ballet dancer depicts women as beautiful, free, powerful and athletic.
"The reason I chose the ballet dancer is that I see her as an icon of beauty and power. Therefore, I chose her to become the hero of my works," Ms Jebril, 35, said at her house in Gaza City.
"It shows what the woman feels, lives, faces and how she is chained, it shows what she feels in Gaza to the audience," she said, sitting in front of several of her paintings.
Men and women, Ms Jebril said, "live in a ticking bomb in Gaza", not knowing what will happen next.
Yesterday, in violence echoing her words, Israeli troops killed four Hamas militants in gun battles during raids yesterday against one of the group's cells in the occupied West Bank, an Israeli military spokesman said.
An Israeli officer and a soldier were critically wounded, the spokesman added.
The shoot-outs marked the most serious violence between Israel and Hamas since an 11-day Gaza war in May and threatened to raise tensions along the Israeli border with the coastal enclave and in the West Bank. - REUTERS
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