Artwork: Behn Samareh, Temporary Memorial, Bombay Beach, California, United States, 2023-
Photograph: Kevin Key
It is difficult to write about what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank. I find myself using other people’s words, mostly the words of Palestinian children. Often, I am speechless and my heart aches and I am horrified. There are so many images I can never unsee. But I never look away, I bear witness, as countless are doing around the globe.
Californian artist Behn Samareh transformed his grief at what he was witnessing into a “temporary memorial” at Bombay Beach, California, for the Gazan children killed in the war this past year. It’s a memorial for all children who have suffered and died in this war, including the 36 Israeli children that were identified as killed on October 7 as a result of the Hamas attack. Samerah describes the project as, “Almost an act of desperation. I didn’t know what else to do.” It is an ephemeral installation comprising drilled shallow holes for graves dug into the dirt. It is an ongoing “renegade” project as it is on public land designated by the council for “dust mitigation,” and Samerah says he will continue to create it as long as the war lasts. When he began, the number of children killed was 8,000-9,000, and the number climbs with each passing day. Over 16,000 children have been killed, many are missing and unaccounted for; thousands of children no longer have parents or family, and many, their bodies are still under rubble. Samareh says he was trying to find a way to visualise the number, to bring it into a kind of reality, to represent each life with the means he had. The ephemerality of the memorial captures something of the quality of memory, how it morphs with time. Who will remember all these lives lost, of the children who barely had time to live? Once the people who do remember these children are no longer on this earth, the existence of these children ceases to be, as they leave nothing behind to mark their presence.
I’ve studied many artworks that have the element of being memorials, mainly for the Holocaust. Works such as Rachel Whiteread’s Nameless Library. Rebecca Horn’s Concert in Reverse and Concert for Buchenwald. Anselm Kiefer’s earlier paintings such as Shulamith, inspired by Paul Celan’s incredible poem, Todesfuge (Death Fugue). Christian Boltanski’s series Lessons in Darkness. Boltanski’s project had that quality of ephemerality of memory, made of simple materials, the faces in the photographs ghostly and blurred, the candles and lights flickering in darkened spaces, the alignment of wires and images into altars, the feeling sombre and haunting. Memory is not fixed, and numbers alone can’t impress the enormity of loss and the depth of grief, or the trauma of the events that led to such a loss of life.
And yet these artists try, because forgetting is not an option.
Poem based on an encounter with a little girl in Gaza, carrying her sibling:
why are you carrying her?
she’s my sister
her leg is hurt,
aren’t you tired?
yes, I’ve been walking
for an hour
to get her leg treated
we have no car,
I’ll take you, come with me?
thank you
you love her very much?
yes