"BEYOND CONTAGION"

This painting is the first one of Hamida's "COVID TRILOGY".

In the early days of 2020, it began with some kind of whispers - a mysterious illness was rumoured to creeping through crowded cities and remote villages alike. The rumour was that an animal bug from an animal market in China which was close to a virology research laboratory had jumped over to humans.

No one knew its name, its true origins, or its potential to spread. It was a silent intruder, slipping through the cracks of our understanding, leaving uncertainty and fear in its wake. As the days turned into weeks, the world watched in horror as this unseen enemy unleashed its havoc. Hospitals overflowed with the sick and the dying, while armies of scientists scrambled to unlock the secrets of the contagion. In those uncertain times, every cough, every sniffle, became a source of anxiety for everybody around.

As the days stretched into months, the world seemed to shrink around us. Borders closed, economies faltered, and lives were forever changed. Slowly, painfully we began to adapt. Everybody outside the own home was considered a danger, even close family members. Even the air itself was suspected to be tainted by those tiny particles.

Contagion seemed to linger in every gust of wind. We tried to protect ourselves with masks to filter out the invisible threat that hung in the air around us. Indeed, the spread of Covid was felt like a dense fog or a relentless sandstorm sweeping over the world. Yes, it felt like a sandstorm whose tiny but dense particles swept through cities and towns with an unstoppable force, leaving devastation in its wake, sparing nothing and nobody. To combat the relentless advance of the contagion, we sanitized everything in sight, from doorknobs to countertops, as if cleanliness could ward off the contagion's grasp.

As the world struggled to come to grips with the magnitude of the crisis, the very essence of daily life was transformed. Streets lay deserted, once-bustling cities reduced to eerie ghost towns as lockdowns and restrictions took hold.

The future seemed out of sight. We tried to stare through the sandstorm in order to see what the end of it all would eventually look like.

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