Enis Köstepen

My name is Malak Mattar "I left Gaza a day before 7 October 2023 to embark on my master’s course at Central Saint Martins in London. However, my big plans were crushed, as my family immediately began trying to survive the intense Israeli bombardments that followed and having to move multiple times. My mum was a few metres away from her school when it was flattened, killing her students and colleagues, and my father lost his cousins while they were serving aid to displaced Palestinians. As I was attempting to make new work in my studio in Archway, London, I successfully managed to call my father in Gaza after weeks of telecommunications blackout. I could hear the sound of bombardments falling at a close distance to my parents. He asked me what new works I was producing. I wondered what the point was of art in times of so much uncertainty, but he stressed how I should make the voices and stories of the people in Gaza heard through my art. This call brought to an end my feelings of paralysis. I felt compelled to make a large painting that documented the harrowing events of the genocide in the Gaza Strip that had unfolded up to that point in time. Calling it No Words, I worked on it intensely over two months and completed it in February 2024. It portrays the devastation inflicted upon human lives, animals, archaeological sites and cherished historical buildings, alongside the profound impact of forced displacement, which has now eviscerated Palestinian society for generations." Excerpt from Archiving Gaza in the Present: Memory, Culture and Erasure, edited by Dina Matar and Venetia Porter (New Texts Out Now) Read the interview with the editors, now on Jadaliyya: jadaliyya.com/Details/47430/…