Unchilding

Forty-three resin building blocks hold marbles for the Palestinian childhoods frozen in motion. As of May 2023, 170 children between the ages of 14 and 17 are held in prison, in an egregious breach of human rights and international law worldwide. The occupiers of Palestine are the only country in the world to hold children in prison. This is a full, illegal breach of the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child.20 Children, mostly boys, are arrested by their country’s occupiers in order to be deterred from activism and to stunt future generations of resistance and development. Zionist military courts try children as young as 12, and keep them in arbitrary detention until they are of legal age to be imprisoned, as was the case with Ahmed Manasra. Boys become men in prison, and Palestinian society lives with a series of amputated limbs. Children are also placed under house arrest by the Zionist forces, parents become stand-in prison guards and the family home becomes a prison cell.21 In this work, the children are suspended marbles and the resin building blocks are pawns in a wider political game.

The block with a sole marble is made in tribute to Ahmed Manasra, who has been in solitary conThe United Nations General Assembly Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners were revised in 2015 to extend restrictions on solitary confinement since November 2021, when he was 19. The United Nations General Assembly Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners were revised in 2015 to extend restrictions on solitary confinement exceeding 15 days. Ahmed has been alone in a jail cell for years, not days, and has developed schizophrenia as a result of this and compounded traumas inflicted by Zionist settlers and armed forces.

Exhibited in Synthesis NYU Masters Thesis Exhibition at 421 Campus – May 2023 in Abu Dhabi, UAE