Dima Srouji
Maintaining the Sacred, 2023
Hand-carved plaster with inset colored glass pieces
Courtesy of the Artist and the Diriyah Biennale Foundation
This Installation is a reminder of the incursion of Israeli forces into the Haram Al-Sharif (Temple Mount) in Jerusalem in April last year. The soldiers smashed 30 of the colored-glass...
This Installation is a reminder of the incursion of Israeli forces into the Haram Al-Sharif (Temple Mount) in Jerusalem in April last year. The soldiers smashed 30 of the colored-glass windows that adorn the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque, damage that would reportedly take around 15 years’ worth of work to repair (each window is made of hand-carved plaster with inset colored glass pieces, and takes around six months to remake) even if the Israeli authorities hadn’t blocked their reconstruction. “The technique is a dying craft with a few practitioners in Yemen, one in Cairo, and another in Jerusalem,” the artist’s statement says. The work was created “in honor of the history of craft, the worshippers seeking a connection with the spiritual world despite the fragility of the space, and of the bodies protecting our public space.”