You would be forgiven for looking around Andrei Kozlov’s studio, dotted with paintings inspired by his eight months as a hostage of Hamas, and seeing only darkness – canvases splashed with grey and ochre, guns tucked into waistbands or resting against a wall, moments of angst, disbelief and pain.
A painting of a blackened street his captors led him down is drowned in darkness, but in the distance is a sliver of cerulean sky. A screaming man’s reflection is caught, but it is in a mirror on a bubblegum-pink wall. A house beside barren trees is seen in the desolation of night, but its windows glow with lamplight.
“When you’re surrounded by something dark,” the 28-year-old Kozlov says, standing in a shared art studio he works at in the Hudson Yards neighbourhood of New York, “there always can be light inside.” Nearly a year after his release from captivity, Kozlov is familiar with juxtapositions.
He is mostly happy and well adjusted, able to matter-of-factly describe his ordeal, but sometimes returns in his mind to what he went through. He is alive and filled with gratitude but feels the weight of those not yet free. He is no longer a hostage but knows the world may always see him as one.
“I will be a former hostage forever,” he says. “It will forever be a part of my life.”
