After having discovered a series of children’s paintings depicting war scenes from 1956, RAWI invited Port Said's children once more to express themselves through art and tell us about their lives over the two years following the revolution of 25 January.
The participants of the 2013 art competition at the launch event where the 1956 paintings were exhibited alongside the 2013 children’s paintings at the Port Said general library
In our previous issue we featured the story of Mohamed Labib and Seddika Hassanein (both art teachers), who in 1956 packed their supplies and left for Port Said immediately after the brutal Tripartite Aggression had ended. (see: https://rawi-magazine.com/articles/children_of_port_said/) They gathered a group of boys and girls and held an art workshop for therapy. The resulting paintings were nothing short of incredible. The exhibition travelled the world and was a major success.
In 2013, RAWI magazine, along with the couple’s son Tarek Labib, invited Port Said’s children once more to express themselves through art and tell us about their lives over the past two years. We worked in tandem with a local gallery, Ganna, and made a call for the children to submit drawings inspired from their lives in the past three years.
Four months after the announcement, the paintings the children submitted to us documented events from the football game massacre and the subsequent shootings at the funerals to images from daily life such as the queues for bread and the petrol crisis. The artworks chronicled three turbulent years in Egypt through the eyes of children who live in the city that has possibly suffered the most.
A celebration accompanied an exhibition held in Port Said in September 2013 which the children and parents greatly enjoyed. The exhibition presented a historical record of two tumultuous periods from Egyptian history, chronicled without the stifled analysis of academia or the sensationalism of media. We saw a straight-from-the-heart expression from children who had just lived through the events in each and every one of these paintings.
Most Popular
Jewellery is often prized for its beauty, but to many, it also provides protection from the world's malevolent forces, its very shape imbued with power.
Before being nationalized under President Nasser, the Sednaoui Khazindar department store held a special place in the hearts of generations of Cairenes. This is the story of the family that created that legacy.
RAWI resurrects a children’s exhibition, born in the war-torn Port Said of 1956.
Researchers often feel that heritage in private hands is lost to enquiry, but through the publication of such collections, the widely dispersed and inaccessible becomes assembled and available to all, and heritage previously thought lost can be saved for posterity. The 'lost' history of Egypt's stock certificates is a case in point.
Associated with great scientists and intellectuals, from Napoleon's savants to modern scholars, the recently destroyed Institut d'Égypte played a major role in Egypt's intellectual history, and led to the foundation of further centres of learning.
