thesilkroadtoday
Cairo — On the evening of April 16, 2026, at 6:00 PM, El-Hanager Hall at the Cairo Opera House will host the exhibition “Gaza in the Heart” by visual artist and novelist Abdel Razek Okasha. The event stands as an open invitation to lovers of Palestine and free people around the world to engage with a visual and human experience inspired by one of the most painful contemporary tragedies.
The exhibition presents selections from his artistic project “The Gaza Epic,” which has been read and written about by Ashraf Aboul-Yazid. The works are shaped between two studios: one on the banks of the Nile in Cairo, and the other in Paris near the Seine—symbolizing a dialogue between two shores and two cultures, transforming color into a language of resistance.
El-Hanager Hall was an ideal choice to display the artist’s 30-meter mural “Gaza Diaries,” among works that revive and reimagine the tragedy.
In these works, Okasha does not merely document events; he reinterprets them aesthetically and spiritually. In one painting, human masses merge into dense darkness, while a gray light flickers—like fragile hope or the flash of an explosion—embodying the collective pain of Gaza as a universal human symbol. The artist employs an ascending circular motion that gives the work an inner energy resembling a visual elegy.
In “Gaza is Burning,” intense chromatic energy dominates, where the colors of fire and blood clash with flashes of blue and yellow, expressing the struggle for survival amid devastation. The experience reaches its peak in “Al-Ahli (Al-Maamadani) Hospital,” inspired by the bombing of the historic hospital, where a place of healing transforms into an icon of pain, and color becomes a narrative language that silently tells the tragedy.
The exhibition affirms that Okasha’s work transcends conventional classification, aligning instead with contemporary symbolic expressionism that turns art into a human testimony. Here, the paintings are not only seen but also heard—they resonate with the sounds of pain and resilience, posing a moral question to the world: Is it enough to witness without putting out the fire?
