Mahmoud Salameh - Writing Through Fences
Mahmoud Salameh
Syria, Digital cartoon, 2022
Image description: Dark red sillhouettes of hands, heads and torsos reach up, on top of them are black bodies, and heads with arms and hands reaching up into a pale yellow background. The bodies and faces are bound and blindfolded. Black bombs of various sizes fall down toward the people.
Mahmoud Salameh is a cartoonist, illustrator and animator. He was born in Damascus, Syria, of Palestinian origin and is now living in Australia. Mahmoud’s animation ‘Freedom is mine’, won Best Animation Film Award at Buddha International Film Festival, India, 2022. His work is published in Arab and Australian newspapers, including Al Safir and The Guardian, he has exhibited in collective and solo shows in Damascus, Beirut, Warrane-Sydney, Naarm-Melbourne and Berlin and his animations shown at national and international film festivals. You can find more of Mahmoud's work at his instagram:
@salameh_art
The editors of Free Palestine: A Convergence of Voices asked Mahmoud Salameh if we could use this work to headline the project.
About Free Palestine: A Convergence of Voices
Founders of Writing Through Fences are horrified and heartbroken by the genocidal force of Israel fully unleashed against Gaza and the whole of Palestine.
We are also appalled by much of the media coverage around Israel’s genocide against Palestinians and are committed to resisting the silence and propaganda of this colony; propaganda which promotes dangerous narratives of white supremacy enabled through structures grounded in the brutality of occupation and Indigenous dispossession.
Many of us know well how narratives are used to demonise and dehumanise. We also know their material and bodily effects. We follow Palestinian journalist and co-founder of We Are Not Numbers, Ahmed Alnaouq, in calling out the violence of much mainstream media and, we add, publishers, ‘Most of the mainstream media in the West has always been complicit against the Palestinian people… The blood of my family is on their hand’ -@AlnaouqA
Founding member, Hani Abdile often reminds us that ‘language can heal and language can harm’.
Free Palestine: A Convergence of Voices, is an offering of solidarity with Palestinians and an acknowledgement of the vibrancy of Palestinian arts and literature. It is also an offering we hope will mobilise non-Palestinians to untangle the racist colonial histories we/they have been fed and centre Palestinian voices and knowledges. It is an offering we hope will help to counter the harmful language of Australian media, and that of the ideological West, that is mobilised in the interests of continuing the settler colonial project.
We demand CEASEFIRE NOW, land back, end apartheid, end the siege, right of return, justice and liberation.
We demand truth telling, treaty, land back, prison abolition and justice for First Nations people in so-called australia
From the river to the sea, always was, always will be.
– Eghbal Asadi, Hani Abdile, Bernadette Ryan, Sriharan Ganeshan, Rose Ertler, Mohammed Boush, Farhad Bandesh, Jenell Quinsee and Janet Galbraith, 7th November 2023
