In late 2009, international media widely reported the transformation of two donkeys into zebras in Gaza. This cross-dressing of the species variety took place at the hands of an entrepreneur whose zoo was badly damaged during the war earlier that year.

The lion Sabrina and her brother Sakher, smuggled into Gaza from Egypt as cubs, survived the incursion. Few of the zoo’s 400 animals and birds were as lucky. Its cheerful ostrich and pensive camel were killed in an air strike. Others, like the much-loved pair of zebras, perished of starvation. Since buying a zebra and smuggling it through the Gaza tunnels was too expensive, the businessman opted instead to buy two local donkeys and paint them with stripes. 

Waked uses this real-life anecdote to comment on the performativity of political reality and the various roles implicated players choose or are forced to adopt. For the ass to play a zebra, for the Gaza children to pretend that they are looking at one animal even if they know that they are looking at another, and for the world to see an unproportioned act of aggression as one of self-defense.

In Bath Time, a donkey takes a good shower after a long day saturated with the spectator's gaze and laughter at the Gaza Zoo. In washing out the paint, though, Waked hints at the inevitability of this reality’s ultimately uncovering.

Sharif Waked is a Palestinian artist whose work engages with Islamic culture and history and its interaction with the Israeli occupation and hegemonic Jewish culture in Palestine. Waked is also interested in derivatives of classical Islamic culture, such as calligraphy, and the way form and content, or images and text, interact in this practice. Without really holding a cynical approach, in his dive into the depths of the cultural implications of Israeli occupation, he illuminates anecdotic events that illuminate its cruelty. 

Courtesy of the artist, KADIST collection.