From Trump To Assad: Syrian Artist Reimagines World Leaders As Vulnerable Refugees
Darpan News Desk IANS, 09 Jun, 2017 01:47 PM
A Syrian refugee artist has spent 19 months creating a series of paintings in his Brussels studio showing world leaders as displaced or disenfranchised people and is showcasing them in a Dubai gallery.
Abdalla Al Omari’s “The Vulnerability Series” includes paintings of US President Donald Trump as a bedraggled refugee with a sleeping child in his arms, Russian President Vladimir Putin as a beggar, as well as former British Prime Minister David Cameron and former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
“My aim somehow shifted from an expression of anger to a more vivid desire of disarming these figures, (to) picture them outside their positions of power”, Omari told Al Jazeera.
Omari started painting in Damascus shortly after the start of the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011. He fled and was granted asylum in Belgium.
Gallery visitor Sami Azraq said the portraits were a unique take on the refugee crisis.
“I think it’s an interesting way or it’s a nicer way to look at the problem rather than our usual news or social media or other outlets,” he said.
In a unanimous and binding decision, the UN's top court said the status quo should be maintained pending final decision to be taken in the case that has brought ties between the two rival neighbours to a new low.
Theresa May on Thursday unveiled her Conservative Party's election manifesto that makes cutting immigration from countries like India, a central poll pledge if her party wins the June 8 general election.
A white police officer in the southern city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, has been acquitted of manslaughter in the fatal shooting of an unarmed African-American man, US news reports said on Thursday.
A speeding car crashed into pedestrians on a sidewalk in New York City's busy Times Square on Thursday, killing one person and seriously causing multiple injuries, witnesses said.
