We all remember hearing about the shoe that nearly took out president Bush on his farcical tour of Iraq.
Artist Laith al-Amiri and a group of children at an orphanage in Iraq built a large bronze-coloured sculpture of the shoe. Later it was erected in Tikrit, Iraq, but sadly ordered removed the next day. Apprently it took the artist and her elves 15 days of hard slog to make the sculpture and cost around $5000 to build. It had been on display in the orphanage and was made in of honour Muntazer al-Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist currently in prison for throwing the historic shoe at Bush during a press conference in December.
The brave artist we hope will continue with similar work, and the children will no doubt never forget this cutting edge project. There is no news as to whether the journalist has heard about the honour bestowed on him by the children from his prison cell. We on the other hand, are mostly helpless, despite perhaps feeling the injustice from oh-so-far away. It is a surprise that the Iraqi officials do not feel some sense of the right thinking in the work, as they view the destruction of the war on their own towns and people, let alone the satirical humour in the work, an honour often allowed art that is not so easily permitted elsewhere.
Video footage of the sculpture and some very adorable and the children themselves is available here.
