There But Not There

from the 100 Days of Solitude series                                                                        Nidaa Badwan

The first line of Leo Tolstoy's classic Anna Karenina is "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." To the extent that that's true, the same can be said for individuals. There is, for example, the unhappiness that comes from within, which is quite different from that which assails us from situational, or life, circumstances. And regardless of the source, people have different ways of coping. Nidaa Badwan is 27 and lives in Gaza. Her way of coping, at least for the last year and a half, has been to stay in her room and create art. And that has made her room very colorful and has led her to completing a project called 100 Days of Solitude, consisting of 14 self-portraits. "You can say now there is another life for me," she says. "I feel I'm not living here. The project made new windows for me": http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/28/world/middleeast/finding-gaza-unbearable-artist-creates-her-own-world-in-one-room.html?_r=0