Khaled Dawwa, born in 1985, began working on a monumental installation in 2018, “Voici mon cœur- Here is my heart” which was presented at the International City of Art in Paris in 2021 and is now showing at the Museum Beelden aan Zee in Scheveningen/Den Haag.
In 2011, together with his family, Khaled Dawwa fled his home country of Syria, first to Lebanon, then to France, the legendary country of artists in exile. Hence the title Voici mon Coeur of this exhibition at this beautiful seaside museum. I was not familiar with Dawwa ‘s work – it is broad and varied, depending on his subject matter.
While in Lebanon, in an effort to preserve his work, he created the Facebook page, “Clay & Knife”, keeping his name secret to put on record most of the work he had destroyed in order to flee. Included in the destruction were earlier sculptures such as a series of obese, if not at times obscene old male figures, clearly meant as political caricatures of imaginary tyrants.
It is not hard to see what inspires his imagery. In this current exhibition we see a wall of bombed-out houses – in fact, it shows a whole street that was once a community. As he explains, each house is different, as if originally built by the hands of its occupants as their means allowed and tailored to the needs of a family. In Dawwa’s piece there is the stillness of an annihilated town scape and social fabric, the sadness of a lonely grandmother figure slumped on the steps of her former home showing its broken contents to the world, a body split open. She sits staring at the dusty ground, prayer beads in hand.
Is this a work of Khaled Dawwa’s imagination? I rather feel it is the ghost of what he experienced, a visual memory etched on his brain. Anyone who was around to see the post-1945 destruction of Europe’s cities understands this work. Some four or five years after the end of the war I saw such vistas. As a three-year-old I saw whole sides of houses ripped away, exposing rooms still containing furniture flung about by the bombs. I was especially scared of a large bath tub that stood perilously close to the edge of such a three-walled room, exposed to the elements. My sister and I ran past that house on our way to kindergarten, knowing that the next rain storm would surely fill the bath and send it tumbling down to crush us. And during a stormy night it did.
The saddest aspect of this work is that we know that this very thing has recently occurred, not only in Syria but also in Lebanon, Yemen, Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine. People’s lives all over the world are destroyed, left to fall into ruin like the rubble around them. And there we were, the Baby-boomers, thinking we would never again see such devastation. Here Kaled Dawwa’s creation brings home what it is to lose your home and move from country to country to find refuge.
Impressive and very moving. Not to be missed. Astrid Burchardt, 5th April 2025
