As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.
As unthinkable bloodshed continues relentlessly across the Middle East, we cannot fail to be transfixed by the images and videos taken by those in the midst of the horrors blasted across our news portals. The immediate trauma is palpable, but what is far worse is an increasing awareness that the nightmare moments we witness cannot be fixed, cannot be made better, that nothing can ever be the same. For those caught in the crossfire, forced to leave their homes, grieving, with no adequate supplies, shelter or safe passage, there is no time to stop and reflect, not right now. ITERARTE turns to look at projects which have been executed as a response to such ordeals. When words are hard to utter, art can provide a response, some answers, some solace.
Displacement and the deep-rooted suffering that forced migration can cause is a subject that artists have always been compelled to explore, and has been especially considered in the publications of cultural theorist Stuart Hall since the 1990s, in particular related to artists who were part of the Caribbean diaspora to the UK, such as Yinka Shonibare, Lubaina Himid and Frank Bowling. Themes of nostalgia and longing prevail, as does the use of fabrics and materials reminiscent of their home countries, and maps.
In a previous article we explored a theme on journeys that have been represented by artists. It concluded with the powerful work of Bouchra Khalili, The Mapping Journey Project, where we hear migrants describing their individual stories of displacement, watching them mark on a map the directions they were forced to move.
Mona Hatoum, who was born in Lebanon to Palestinian parents, was in London in 1975 when the Lebanese Civil War broke out, so was forced to stay in London, where she has remained, as have Bowling, Shonibare and Himid. Mona Hatoum has spent much of her career tracing routes and referring to cartographies of power through repurposing found materials and using them to create world maps, from clear glass marbles (Map, 1999) and magnets (Continental Drift, 2000) to materials imbrued with meaning related to her homeland, such as soap (Present Tense, 1996). Hot Spot III (2009) presents a giant globe in the form of a cage, with glowing red neon marking the contours of the world’s landmasses, indicating danger.
The Encounter of the First and Last Particles of Dust by Stéphanie Saadé at first glance looks like a map stitched into fabric, but it is intentionally hard to read until you understand the backstory. The work is the carpet from the room the artist occupied as a teenager in Beirut from 1995-2001, torn off and embroidered with the 18 most significant trajectories she took during those years, marking her arrival in adulthood and the supposed ‘freedom’ that warrants.
Saadé’s practice is inextricably linked to themes of personal displacement. At Frieze London 2024 Focus section, Marfa’s booth (awarded the FLUXUS-CPGA Prize) was a solo presentation of recent work including Geographical Coordinates (2023) which are clothes worn by the artist following her departure from Lebanon to Paris following the Beirut Port Explosion in 2020, with the coordinates of the 6 apartments she has lived in since being displaced, again.
Many artists embrace the harsh political realities of being displaced more explicitly in their practice. Artist and musician Hiwa K was born in Sulaymaniyah, the cultural hub of Iraqi Kurdistan, which he left in his mid-twenties before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. View from Above (2017) was presented at documenta 14 in Kassel in 2017, and follows a documentary format of a map which was crucial to memorise in order to gain political asylum, of a place which many refugees would call home, but for the immigration officials it was purely a theoretical exercise.
When We Were Exhaling Images (2017) was a major installation by Hiwa K n the same edition of documenta, made up of drain pipes filled with furniture and personal objects, replicating the places refugees travel inside and are forced to call home during their journey across European borders. Rushdi Anwar is an artist originally from Halabja, Kurdistan, who lives between Chiang Mai, Thailand and Melbourne, Australia. His work is based on his lived experience of being a child caught in the Rawaka refugee exodus of 1991 and the ensuing trauma and socio-political persecution he has witnessed. His ideas are presented so powerfully in the ever-evolving installation Irhal of domestic chairs that have been individually burned and are stacked precariously and yet never fall - representative of the fragility and yet resilience of the displaced.
The psychological effect of displacement explored here is something many artists are compelled to depict, perhaps most evocatively in figurative forms, such as the swirling, mesmerising canvases of the Iraqi Ahmed Alsoudani, who fled to Syria and then the US during the first Gulf War. At some points surrealist inspired, others recalling Picasso’s Guernica or Goya’s Disasters of War, his narratives are new, shocking and reactive of a nightmare dystopia witnessed at first hand.
By contrast, the paintings of Mohammed Sami, also born in Baghdad who first immigrated to Sweden and then the UK, are seemingly realistic and calm - their scenes domestic, their palette subdued. And yet there is something else. A sense of unease, loss, tension and tragedy lying under the surface. Using traditional forms of still life and landscapes, his images are sometimes like stage sets, such as Upside Down World, its post-modern architectural forms dimly viewable through a yellow fog, what at first glance appear to be flowers turn out to be discarded plastic waste and thorns.
Nature can sometimes be seen to prevail and create some respite to trauma - Abed Al Kadiri is a Lebanese artist who understands the power of art as a form of resistance, and existence. His ongoing project Today, I would like to be a tree has taken the form of drawings, books and large-scale murals presenting hand-drawn trees which stand as powerful motifs of stability and endurance, which have increasingly turned red (a parallel feature assesses the use of the colour red in art, and indeed as is not surprising, red is a common colour that artists in the forced diaspora turn to, connected to violence, pain and bleeding).
Ali’s Boat by the Iraqi artist Sadik Kwaish Alfraji takes the form of a book and animation (2015), following Alfraji’s personal history of leaving Iraq and moving to the Netherlands in 1991 but returning following the death of his father. Working exclusively in black and white, the naïve, tender figures are full of emotion, the simple forms betraying the pain and trauma of living through a nightmare time of being forced to leave your homeland as it gets destroyed.
Hazem Harb’s practice is close to that of a researcher. He collects and synthesises archives from Palestine, creating collages and installations which re-propose the history of Palestine and its nuanced narratives and hidden histories from his land, presenting an alternative, universal perspective. There is a strong sense of nostalgia in these works, but also a reportage responsibility in shedding light on the ongoing immigration crisis and colonisation.
Proudly born in Gaza, and now living in Dubai, since October 7, 2023 (he had been visiting Gaza that September) Harb has more recently turned back to more directly figurative work, making sketches in charcoal such as his Dystopia Is No a Noun series, feeling the medium perfectly represents the current horrors, being made from burnt wood. A recent exhibition took as its title Gauze, referring to a series of small artworks where he stuck medical strips of gauze on brown cardboard paper to create figures. Gauze as a material ironically originated in textile factories in Gaza and is now needed there more than ever in the treatment of the wounded. He feels a visceral need to represent suffering and pain in his expressive works, which he sees as a new form of resistance.
An exhibition Under Fire at Darat Al-Funun, an art centre in Amman, Jordan is showing works by four displaced Gazan artists, Basel Al-Maqousi, Majed Shala, Raed Issa and Sohail Salem. Much like Harb, they sought out materials from what they found around them, medical aid packages, food containers and school notebooks, and their subject matter was the humanity surrounding them.
Disruptions is a series of photographs (86 screenshots) the Palestinian artist Taysir Batniji took between 24 April 2015 and 23 June 2017 of glitched video calls with his family in Gaza while he was living in Paris, brought together in a photobook by Loose Joints (2024). Our reliance on technology to connect over distance is thrown into disarray through these alarming, distorted images which are prescient of the destruction of Gaza, the cutting off of communications and the tragic separation and loss of loved ones.
Abdul Rahman Katanani is a third-generation refugee, born in 1983 in the Sabra refugee camp in Beirut, in brutal, hostile times. His artwork both represents this history, through the materials he turns to, such as zinc metal sheets, kitchen utensils, laundry pegs and fabrics which were available to him, but also manages to inject some sense of escapism, resilience and hope in his works. He grew up painting colourful graffiti murals on the walls of the camp, and his signature wall-mounted metal sculptures often depict children at play. We will return after six days is a larger-than-life, four-piece installation representing a family in migration, the title referring to the six-day war of 1967. Representative of millions, the sense of companionship, strength and determination of this group, moving forward, together, is a signal of the power of the human spirit in the face of tragedy.
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