The Art of Resistance: Defending Academic Freedom since 1933 | Page 82
A journey into exile Issam Kourbaj
When I began to learn the Arabic alphabet, my almost illiterate
mother helped me to learn how to write by holding my hand and
making me draw the first letter of my name. This letter ‘? ,’??which is
pronounced as ‘Ain’ in Arabic, produces a sound exactly equivalent
to the word Eye in my mother tongue. Through an almost mystical
coincidence, this is also the case in English where the first letter
of my name ‘I’ also echoes the sound of the word Eye. Since then I
started to learn how to form my artist’s ‘eye’.
To make ends meet, while growing up in the Druze mountains
in Syria, I became a boy-calligrapher. At first I assisted my older
brother in his projects and later acquired my own ‘clients’. My
first proud commission was the shop sign for a popular barber’s
shop. And this is how the drawing and design of words, (the art of
calligraphy) became my first means of survival and the beginning of
my journey into mark-making.
I had no idea when I left Syria that I would one day use fragments
of Arabic script in my artwork. Language features prominently
in my work Sound Palimpsest, which welled up in reaction to the
second invasion of Iraq. In Sound Palimpsest, a group of loose leaf
sheets, I tried to capture the fragility of human beings and their
bodies and souls against the brutal mindless war machine. I used
haunting fragments of walls with children’s graffiti, found text and
w ords from medical debris and X-ray plates, torn parts of books
and broken pieces of song. In her introduction to this work for
the exhibition Iraq’s Past Speaks to the Present, curator Venetia
Porter wrote: ‘Kourbaj is an artist inspired by what transpires
around him in the course of daily life, yet he also embraces the
non-representational. Lack of confinement by the limits of the
paper, canvas and medium allows him absolute creative freedom.
He also draws on the expressive and candid reactions observed in
children’s art; this could also account for the element of nostalgia
that is recognisable in Kourbaj’s work’.
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The Art of Resistance? Defending Academic Freedom
Earlier this year I worked on my Excavating the Present
installation, which is a tribute to Syrian mothers. This work is a
palimpsest of two different types of camera-less photograms.
My raw materials (or found objects) were an assemblage of X-rays
produced by invisible electromagnetic radiation, on Mylar plastic
coated with light sensitive emulsion. I worked with those to
produce a second kind of photogram – produced by visible light on
light-sensitive black-and-white paper in a darkroom, and that’s how
the work took shape using layers, and archaeology as a baseline.
Frances Carey (formerly Deputy Keeper of Prints and Drawings
and Head of National Programmes at the British Museum)
described the above installation as follows: “That Kourbaj should
favour archaeological metaphor is not surprising for one whose
personal history has involved so many layers, translations and
re-imaginings. Palimpsest as a metaphor for the ‘excavation’ of
memory has a distinguished lineage through Thomas De Quincey
and Baudelaire. A true palimpsest is created through erasure then
re-inscription, often leaving the ghost of the original image or text
behind. This is what the X-ray technique can so powerfully evoke,
revealing the shadows of existence and intimations of a deeper
meaning or fear”.
As a Syrian artist, I am observing from a very painful distance
the evisceration of my homeland, its people, its society, its cities
and villages, its past and present, its history and its memory.
With every hourly news bulletin I am reminded of the inhuman
conditions and atrocities, which courageous women, children and
men, are enduring and of the lies and distortions and deletions
which mean that many of these atrocities might be forever
forgotten, buried like many of the dead, never to be heard of again
or remembered. I fear for the future of my people and my country
and whether having lost so much they can ever find themselves
again, whole and unbroken.