The Contemporary Art Scene in Syria

Social Critique and an Artistic Movement

Charlotte Bank

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000067897
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

This book focuses on the expanding contemporary art scene in Syria, particularly Damascus, during the first decade of the twenty-first century. The decade was characterized by a high degree of experimentation as young artists began to work with artistic media that were new in Syria, such as video, installation and performance art. They were rethinking the role of artists in society and looking for ways to reach audiences in a more direct manner and address socio-cultural and socio-political issues.

The Contemporary Art Scene in Syria will be of interest to scholars of global and Middle Eastern art studies, and also to scholars interested in the recent social and cultural history of Syria and the wider Middle East.

1 “Culture Is Humanity’s Highest Needs”

Art and Artists between Autonomy and Coercion

On 18 September 2015, an article was published in the Syrian pro-government newspaper Tishreen, in which Prime Minister Wael al-Halki was cited talking about the “vital role Arab artists have in enhancing the notion of belonging while immunizing the Arab society against radical takfiri thought”.¹ According to the newspaper, in his speech, al-Halki further elaborated on the Syrian leadership’s role in supporting the “creative and artistic movement” that had “boomed” thanks to its (i.e. the government’s) support, despite efforts to “weaken and isolate its role”.²

Coming amidst the country’s embroilment in an extremely violent war, in the course of which the regime did not hesitate to arrest or pressure artists and cultural producers on several occasions, these statements seemed cynical, to say the very least. At the same time, this attempt by the state to co-opt artistic production and make artists work for its ends was nothing new in the country. Yet, the way the statement stood in stark contrast to the state’s actual treatment of artists added a new and more sinister dimension to the complex relationship between the Syrian state and the artists living and working within its borders. Since the beginning of the uprising in March 2011, artists and cultural figures have been scrutinized by the security apparatus and subjected to coercion to a degree, which exceeds that of the already closely monitored artistic and cultural scene and the control of state censorship. Particularly prominent examples of this were the attack on caricaturist Ali Farzat in August 2011, during which the attackers (believed to be “thugs” close to the regime, so-called shabiha) crushed Farzat’s hands,³ the imprisonment of the painter and graphic artist Youssef Abdelké in July 2013,⁴ the short detention of filmmaker Mohamad Malas in March 2014, when he attempted to travel to Beirut, en route to Geneva in order to present his new film at a festival,⁵ and the arrest of the sculptor Wael Issa Kaston, who was tortured to death shortly after his detention in July 2012.⁶ These artists were in no way involved in the more violent aspects of the Syrian uprising, nor had they joined any armed groups fighting the regime or expressed any support for such groups. And yet, they were treated as major enemies of the state. In a certain, perverse way, this testifies to the importance that the Syrian state accords to art and artists.⁷

While the Syrian state both has assigned and continues to assign art a particular power, Syrian artists themselves have also considered themselves to be active participants in the social and political sphere, for instance, lending their support to the state-building efforts after the country gained independence in 1946. Indeed, any notion of art as an autonomous phenomenon, moving between private galleries and non-profit art spaces, public museums, and independent journalistic criticism as is normal in liberal democracies and remote from any concerns related to social and political reality, is and was quite remote from the realities of the art scene in Syria.⁸ Artists in Syria have always been conscious of the context they were working within and have acted accordingly, keeping in mind the political ramifications of the stances reflected in their work, their lives as social participants, and of course their very subjective being-in-the-world. However, the gap between their self-perceived role and the one defined by the authorities has often given rise to conflictual situations.

Although the Syrian frame for artistic and cultural production might be considered less rigid than the one, for example, in Iraq,⁹ artists in Syria have been subjected to ever-vigilant censorship. Official institutions made sure to let artists know that they and their activities were being monitored and that there were limits to their freedom.¹⁰ As in other authoritarian contexts, the relationship between artists and the Syrian state was a troubled one. When discussing the unofficial art scene in the Soviet Union, the political sociologist Paul Sjeklocha and the artist Igor Mead have demonstrated how authoritarian states view the artist’s gifts as their own, thus regarding the possession of artistic talent as the possession of material which rightly belongs to the state. The artist’s demand for creative autonomy is thereby countered by the state’s demand for political use of this creative energy.¹¹

Since the Ba‘ath Party came to power in Syria in 1963, officials and party-affiliated critics continuously have called upon artists to produce works that “reflected the contemporary conditions of living in Syria, in the Arab world while staying rooted in their heritage”, thus making the message clear they expected “their” artists to convey through their work.¹² Artists, who did not wish to blindly follow the party line, became more and more involved in a difficult and energy-consuming balancing act, seeking to guard their freedom to produce the art they wished, while, at the same time, trying to circumvent the state’s efforts to co-opt their often-critical works. As the Arabist and literary scholar miriam cooke writes, the authoritarian state relentlessly sought to appropriate messages that proposed an alternative to state ideology in order to create its own cultural capital. It thereby forced artists to find a way to produce their art so that it would avoid being appropriated while still challenging the state.¹³ One way to do this was to have recourse to the use of metaphorical and allegorical language, a practice common in the fields of literature, theatre and film. The situation became particularly dire during the regime of Hafiz al-Assad (1970–2000) and, despite initial hopes for an improvement in the political climate in the country, barely changed under his son and successor, Bashar al-Assad. Though less rigorously enforced, censorship remained firmly in place, as did the general uncertainty regarding unwritten rules of what was permitted and what was not.

The preceding remarks make clear that any study of art in Syria will have to take into account the country’s shifting political and social conditions, the role accorded to artists by the authorities and, with this role, all the written and unwritten rules which any artist or cultural player had to consider when acting. In this chapter I will discuss the relationship between artists and the state, along with the framework provided by the Syrian state and its institutions involved in organizing, encouraging and supervising artistic life in the country. Since the practice and appreciation of art in the European modality were closely linked to projects of modernization, progress and state-building, I will begin with a brief outline of some aspects of the relationship between fine art, especially painting, and projects of modernization of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The pioneering artist Tawfiq Tarek will serve as an example to discuss how art became a site within which to express critique of the status quo and negotiate social and political change.

I will then outline the developments of the post-independence era and, in particular, the period under the rule of the Ba‘ath Party. I will end by focusing on my main period of interest, i.e. the first decade of the twenty-first century. I will discuss the social and political changes of that time, how a young generation of artists and cultural producers attempted to push the boundaries of permitted speech and create new spaces for the representation of art and its related discourses.

1.1 Art as an Index of Modernity and Progress: The Syrian “Pioneer” Tawfiq Tarek

Faced with European colonialist expansion, Arab intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had largely become convinced that the Arabs had fallen into a state of stagnation and believed that only a radical break with traditional culture would enable the region to move on and achieve true modernity.¹⁴ In a process referred to as tathqif, “enculturation”, norms of social behaviour and interaction were to be reassessed, and those regarded as harmful discarded.¹⁵ Modern discourses, as they developed in the imperial capitals of Istanbul and Paris, were eagerly followed by the Arab elites, who also adopted Western styles in both dress and interior design, paralleling a substantial change of outdoor spaces in cities throughout the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth century, where new quarters modelled on European urbanization were built and public monuments were erected on central squares.¹⁶

Fine art, its practice and its appreciation were granted an important role in this process and intellectuals and civic leaders were intent on nurturing the understanding of art among the elite, those upper- and middle-class strata of society whose resources allowed them to participate in the process of tathqif. ¹⁷ It became common practice to decorate indoor spaces with painted frescoes, oil paintings and photographs and to commission oil portraits and murals for the walls of the formal rooms in private houses. Patrons sought to manifest their modernity in their choice of motifs, which often presented modern inventions like steamboats, factories and railways or even referred to dramatic, current events, such as the Paris Commune or natural disasters.¹⁸

Artists understood themselves as playing a crucial role in this civilizing mission. From the late nineteenth century onwards, Arab artists had begun to travel to Europe or Istanbul to study art or, alternatively, sought tuition from European painters who were living in the region.¹⁹ The first artists from the Arab world who studied art in Europe are generally referred to as the generation of ruwwad, “pioneers”, in Arabic. The ruwwad painters have often been treated somewhat harshly by later Arab art historians and critics. Their work has been criticized as derivative, as following the works of European artists too closely. While Egyptian art historians have been particularly severe in their criticism of the early painters as “bourgeois” and failing to display “Egyptianness” in their work,²⁰ Syrian art historians have been less severe, although they have also stressed the imitative character of Syrian ruwwad artists’ work and deplored the lack of interest among the artists in radical, international modern art movements.²¹ In general, later Syrian art historical writing on the ruwwad artists tends to focus on a few, canonical artists, whose work is treated descriptively rather than analytically, while the socio-cultural and political context of their work is almost entirely ignored. Likewise, any individual motivation in thematic choices is hardly considered.

In recent scholarship of painters of the Late Ottoman Empire and the states created on its territory after its demise, a re-reading of the works of these artists has begun to take place, which takes their particular socio-cultural environment into consideration and acknowledges the social agency of these artists and their commitment to change of the political and societal status quo.²² If their work had previously been described as out of touch with artistic debates happening in avant-garde circles in Eur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. “Culture Is Humanity’s Highest Needs”: Art and Artists between Autonomy and Coercion
• 2. Commitment, Critique and the Power of Imagination
• 3. Creating Meaning in Visual Art: Technique, Critique and Subject Matter
• 4. Singing in the Kingdom of Silence: Syrian Artists and the International Art World
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index