Bath Time

2012 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

2:12 minutes

Sharif Waked

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Bath Time by Sharif Waked is a short video based on the tragi-comic outcome of the Israeli Blockade and the wars in Gaza. The story tells about how, after a war and the ongoing economic pressure, the Gaza Zoo lost several of their animals, and decided that they could paint a donkey so that it could pose as a zebra. The video imagines the donkey in the shower after a shift impersonating a zebra at the Gaza Zoo, as the hot water slowly washes its faux stripes away. Waked uses the real-life anecdote to comment on the performativity of a political reality, and the various roles implicated players choose or are forced to adopt. For the ass to play a zebra, for the Gaza children to pretend that they are looking at one animal even if they know that they are looking at another, and for the world to see an unproportioned act of aggression as one of self-defense. In washing out the paint, though, Waked hints at the inevitability of this reality’s ultimately uncovering.

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Sharif Waked is a Palestinian artist who’s work enages with with Islamic culture and history, and its interaction with the Israeli occupation and hegemonic Jewish culture in Palestine. Waked is also interested in derivatives of classical Islamic culture, such as calligraphy, and the way form and content, or images and text interact in this practice. Without really holding a cynical approach, in his dive to the depths of the cultural implications of Israeli occupation, he illuminates anecdotic events that illuminate its cruelty.

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Colors:

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• history.n.01
• geopolitics.n.01
• war.n.01
• violence.n.01
• medium.n.01