Dia Azzawi Handala Figurine

This limited edition collector’s piece is a replica of a bronze sculpture made by Dia Al-Azzawi in 2011 in homage to his friend the Palestinian cartoonist Naji Al-Ali. The souvenir contains figurines with 50 unique serial numbers. In 1969, Al-Ali created a cartoon character named Handala, a ten-year-old refugee who became famous across the Arab world as an icon of opposition. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the bare-footed, scraggly-haired boy appeared as a silent witness, standing on the margins of the scenarios that dramatized Al-Ali’s commentaries on Arab and international politics. In 1987 Al-Ali was assassinated in London by an unknown assailant. In homage to Al-Ali, and in memory of the moral courage of his critique, Al-Azzawi re-interpreted the character of Handala as an image of the cartoonist himself and cast it in bronze. Produced on the occasion of the artist’s retrospective in 2016 at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art and Al Riwaq, this replica offers not only a copy of a work of art signed by the artist, but also a testimony to a history of struggle and the involvement of the visual arts in that struggle.