Tartous, SANA – Artist Ali Bahaa Moalla dedicated 70 sculptures to the victims of the terrorist bombings that rocked Ikrima neighborhood in the city of Homs.
Early last month, twin terrorist explosions hit an area near a school compound in Ikrima, leaving 32 people dead and 115 others wounded, most of them school children.
Inspired by the throes of the terrorist war Syria is caught in, Moalla dedicated a special part of the exhibition to vivid models that speak of the sharp pain and heart-wrenching cruelty inflicted by the war.
The most prominent among those pieces was the “victims of terrorism” sculpture that gave shape to death, fear, invocation and escape for survival.
Other sculptures, made out of olive wood, pictured the topic of return to homeland and martyrs’ funeral.
The sculptures recounted in vivid details a multi-element story picturing the martyr’s casket carried on the shoulders of the people on both sides, the martyr’s mother being handed the national flag and the Syrian soldier vowing to continue walking the martyr’s path.
A Syrian map-featuring sculpture was meant as a call on “each and every good hand in the homeland to work together for its protection,” according to Moalla.
Other detailed figurative wood sculptures displayed in the exhibition, which was held at the exhibition hall in the Old City of Tartous, depicted humanitarian and realistic issues that featured aspects of nature, coastal environment and the daily life of the Syrian citizen under the ongoing crisis in the country.
Varying between realism and impressionistic, classical and abstract realism, the sculptures were of different shapes and sizes (20 cm to 2.5 m), like those figuring Virgin Mary, globalization, coffee cup reader, doomsday and woman.
There was also a heritage-related quality to the exhibition, with several of the artistic works meticulously representing the various stages of the making of the Phoenician ship.
Haifa Said