"Lost: Home" By Kristina Kai-ming Lim

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From the U.S. Campaign to End the Occupation website, about the artist:

ABOUT THIS PIECE: In “Lost: home” I created snapshots of dispossession. As a metaphor for memory, I tried to reconstruct a fractured past through individual images that as a whole became a picture of what was lost: home. The Nakba is the catastrophe of losing one’s home: a place of love and family, of land and harvests, of history and ancestors. I created six images that work together in both color and rhythm: the people foremost, the mohair colored hills of the land, the fruit trees, the doors of homes, the locks that are keeping the Palestinans out, and the memories from the past. One of the images is of a woman looking into the darkness between two chained doors; she is looking back on her past and through the doors at what is lost. Another image is that of an aged padlock, resembling physically what it means to leave your ancestral home, locked shut. No longer an open door to family and friends it is instead desolate and empty. One image is of a raised hand holding the key to a home left in the Nakba: the head is clothed in a kaffiya making the individual anonymous and everyone who holds a key, the hand is raised in strength, and the individual walks beneath olive branches, for peace. Another image is of oranges, the fruit harvested off the land of many Palestinians dispossessed in this catastrophe. The final two images depict history and the land itself: the yellow hills of Palestine and the refugees walking away from their homeland and to the camps, with the possessions they could carry and their loved ones beside them. In these images, I hope to portray the beauty of what once was, the sadness and strength of the Palestinians, and the memory of home, now lost.

ABOUT THE ARTIST: Kristina Kai-ming Lim is a painter, working in oils, watercolors, and silk. Her art is a response to the world as she sees it: one where there is beauty in the resilience of humankind and creation as an answer to oppression. Kristina was born in Berkeley, California in 1981 and works there today as union organizer. She is currently working on a children’s book about Palestine.