Manar sent photographs from Gaza when I asked for images for a Palestinian Holocaust exhibition. They were of dead children, his cousin’s murdered daughters. When they arrived, I could not carry them forward. That limit is mine.
When I returned to this photograph of him sitting in the rubble of his home, I told him it was the kind of image I had originally been thinking about. He suggested I use it instead.

He is smiling in the wreckage.

This work combines laser-burned wood, gel transfer, relief sculpture, and paint. He is embedded in the birch panel, part of the grain and part of the structure, yet burned through and sinking into it. His shrapnel scar tears across the rubble and its ghosted remains as it tore through his body.