In the heart of war’s destruction, Khaled Hussein gathered clay from the craters left by missile strikes, and transformed it into living sculptures.
He once said, “These sculptures are born from the mud of devastation, yet they carry the faces of Gazans who stand firm in the face of death.”
Khaled, a fine artist from Rafah, lost his home and everything he created during the war.
He had moved his artworks to a relative’s house, believing they would be safe there ,but that home was bombed too.
With every loss, his determination grew stronger: to turn destruction into art, and loss into a message.
Since childhood, Khaled has seen art as a way to express his opinions and convey the pain of his besieged city.
He graduated from Al-Aqsa University in 1999, got married, and built a family.
Daily life kept him away from sculpting for many years, but when he returned to it in 2015, it felt, as he described, “like coming back to myself.”
Khaled co-founded a gallery project with a group of artists from Gaza and organized several exhibitions, one of them, “I Miss You So Much” in 2021, featured seven clay sculptures molded by his hands.
Each piece told the story of young men who had lost their limbs during the Great March of Return (2018–2020).
But after the most recent war, everything changed.
His home was demolished, and his works were gone.
So Khaled began again, but in a different way.
He started destroying his own sculptures intentionally after completing them, seeing in that act a form of art in itself, a symbol of human fragility and the absurdity of war.
Sometimes he lets them fall to the ground; other times, he throws them into the sea.
In his latest project, “Faces,” Khaled sculpted portraits of displaced people using earth mixed with the debris of missiles.
Exhausted faces ,sad yet proud , silently proclaim:
“We are here… despite everything.”
For Khaled, art is no longer entertainment; It is a language of resilience, preserving the memory of both people and place.
