Ridikkuluz Turns Israeli Attack Dogs Into Art at Salma Sarriedine

Artist Ridikkuluz opens their solo show at Salma Sarriedine gallery with George W. Bush rendered as a Sunday painter, a loafer stuffed in his mouth. The painting, "Ya Kalb (tribute to Al-Zaidi)" (2026), alludes to the moment Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi hurled his shoes at the president during a 2008 press conference in Baghdad. In the canvas, Bush paints a white poodle with glowing blue eyes. A demonic presence lurks inside the dog, foreshadowing dangers to come.

Ironically, that possessed poodle is the most docile dog in the entire exhibition. Throughout the show, Ridikkuluz portrays Israeli soldiers as vicious dogs inflicting atrocities upon Palestinians and other Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) individuals.

What does the title 'Klab' mean?

The show's title, Klab (كلاب), means "dogs" in Arabic and is often used as an insult. The word has taken on new meaning since the Israeli army's latest offensive against Palestinians following October 7, 2023.

The Israeli military's weaponization of dogs has been ongoing for some time, but the widely reported uptick in dog attacks on Palestinians has drawn global condemnation. Documented incidents include footage of an IDF military dog attacking a Palestinian man inside a mosque. In prisons, Israeli soldiers command dogs to sodomize, maul, and humiliate Palestinian men, according to reports published by the New York Times and Al Jazeera. In Ridikkuluz's work, the irascible dog emerges as a symbol for the ongoing genocide and its unrestrained perpetrators.

How does the show invoke Goya and the Nakba?

Later in the exhibition, Ridikkuluz re-adapts Francisco de Goya's famous 1814 painting, "The 3rd of May 1808 in Madrid," in which a Spanish man resists Napoleon's soldiers. The new work, "You're Next (The Fifteenth of May)" (2026), commemorates May 15, 1948 as the start of the Nakba (النكبة), or "catastrophe" — the period in which an estimated 700,000 Palestinians were displaced, dispossessed, or killed during Israel's formation between 1947 and 1949.

By pairing a canonical image of European resistance to imperial violence with the founding dispossession of Palestinians, Ridikkuluz frames the dog not as a peripheral menace but as the show's central figure — one the artist links directly to the perpetrators of the ongoing genocide.

Editor's note: This story contains mentions of sexual assault and harassment. To reach the National Sexual Assault Hotline, call 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) or visit online.rainn.org.