FAce-lIft Gaza: Maisara Baroud

INSTALLATION LOG // >
Exhibit Entry Twenty-Two Distortion Dialogue

I am still alive.

“I draw to tell my friends that I am still alive.”

Some art is made in silence. In well-lit rooms. With clean brushes and carefully chosen palettes.

Other art is made by flashlight.
On the floor.
With the sound of drones overhead.
With grief still wet in your throat.

Maisara Baroud is an artist from Gaza. And he is still alive.

Since October 7, 2023, he has created a daily series of black ink drawings titled “I Am Still Alive.” One image, every day. Not polished. Not curated. Just made. Like a pulse. Like a refusal. Like an archive made in real time by someone who doesn’t know if he’ll live to finish tomorrow’s piece.

“My drawings have become a message to friends, telling them that I am still alive.”

And they are.

These aren’t gentle sketches. They are sharp, stark, stripped-down.
Each one is built in black ink—sometimes pen, sometimes wash—on paper or cardboard, whatever is available in a city where almost nothing is. He draws with urgency, and it shows. The lines are thick. Edges jagged. Shapes collapse in on themselves. His work doesn’t depict Gaza from a distance—it feels like Gaza. The claustrophobia. The heat. The smoke. The silence after the blast.

Recurring motifs emerge:
– Craters that swallow buildings whole.
– Figures with hollow eyes staring out from the edges.
– Bread. Fire. Tents. Crows.
– A figure cradling a child. A woman bent double in grief.
– A hand held up in warning—or farewell.
– Barbed wire drawn like calligraphy.
– Ghosts that never look away.

There is no color. There is no need.

Every image says the same thing:
This is what you did. This is what I saw. This is what I am still carrying.

“Drawing has become my message to challenge the siege, mass destruction, holocaust, and genocide.”

---

There is a long tradition of artists creating during war—making testimony out of scraps.
Kathe Kollwitz carved mourning into stone.
Charlotte Salomon painted her life before she was murdered in Auschwitz.
Etel Adnan wrote of Beirut collapsing under bombs.
Ali Omar Ermes coded resistance into script and pigment.
And now: Maisara Baroud. Drawing in black ink while his city falls down around him.

This, too, is art history.
This, too, deserves to be remembered.

---

And Baroud is not alone in saying, over and over: I am still alive.

Bisan Owda, a 25-year-old filmmaker and humanitarian also from Gaza, posts video updates from her phone. Her eyeliner is smudged with smoke. Her voice cracks with fatigue. But she starts each video the same way:

“I am still alive.”

She doesn’t mean it as reassurance.
She means: I’m still here, and you will not look away.

Where Maisara works in ink, Bisan works in light and sound. But the effect is the same—two artists chronicling genocide in real time, not for museums or prizes, but because this is what it means to survive now. To document. To resist.

Their work isn’t just brave. It’s insistent.
It insists on visibility. It insists on grief. It insists on a record.

Because if they don’t make it—who will?

“Sadness is a decision postponed until after the war.”

---

Maisara’s drawings have now been shown around the world, including a projection in Venice and a powerful exhibition at Zawyeh Gallery in Ramallah. His work was lifted from his Instagram and printed directly onto gallery walls. Still monochrome. Still bleeding.

But Maisara has not left Gaza. He is still there.
Still drawing.

Still alive.

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