Yemen artist uses walls to ‘reach the world’
ADEN: Yemeni artist Alaa Rubil uses the shellpocked buildings of his hometown as canvas, painting images of death and despair to shine a light on the horrors and victims of war.
Not long ater the start of the bloody conflict between Yemen’s internationally recognised government and Houthi rebel forces, the southern port city of Aden, where Rubil lives, became the scene of brutal fighting.
For several months in 2015, artillery rained down on Aden, and Houthi rockets and mortars fired into densely populated areas killed dozens of civilians, Human Rights Watch reported at the time.
Rubil, now 30, has been painting murals since he was a teenager, but found his voice in the atermath of that round of violence.
“I saw that the government was not aware of the people who were displaced,” he told reporters.
“I wanted to communicate my message to the world by drawing people who lost their homes and families,” he said.
“By using the walls, I could reach the world.” Today, the rubble-strewn streets of Aden double as a semi-permanent exhibition of Rubil’s work — and a testament to what the city’s inhabitants have lived through.
On the wall of one shop in a particularly hard-hit area, he painted a large outline of a man’s face, but obscured the eyes, nose and mouth with a cupped palm holding up three sticks of dynamite.
Across the street, on the interior wall of a bombed-out apartment building, a piece he calls “Silent Suffering” depicts a skeleton playing a violin as peace signs float around its skull.
In another work, a girl in a red dress sits on the ground with her head resting in her let hand, next to a black crow perched on a missile.
Behind her, the girl’s deceased relatives, rendered in black and white, peer down from an open window.
The image is based on the true story of a girl who lived in the area and lost her family in the fighting, Rubil said.
“She thinks that war is a game. She thinks that her family is returning,” he said. “So she is waiting for them.”
Amr Abu Bakr Saeed, 42, who lives nearby, told reporters the paintings were a dark but necessary tribute to the dead.
“When we pass through this place, we feel pain, we feel the people who were here,” he said.