How art is blooming amid the Gaza wasteland

From film festivals to Shakespeare, the Palestinian enclave is producing top class culture. In this extract from his new book, Donald Macintyre meets some of the strip’s artists

A handsome poster of James Barry’s 18th-century painting King Lear Weeping over the Dead Body of Cordelia advertised a video performance by school students in the Nuseirat refugee camp, an overcrowded and impoverished sprawl in the middle of the Gaza Strip.

True, Cordelia’s (very modest) decolletage had been Photoshopped to leave an orange blur, but this was the only concession to the socially conservative sensibilities of Hamas, at whose education ministry’s cultural centre the show was taking place.

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from The Guardian http://ift.tt/2z8oXiS