Artistic refuge
Kate Cray
The Yale Herald
Arranged without decoration, the photographs lining the walls of the Davenport Art Gallery record the path of the Syrian conflict as described through refugee voices—the broken promises for peace Assad has left scattered across the region. The photographs come from Kafranbel, a Syrian town whose residents believed that their pleas would spread awareness and ultimately bring peace to the region. They’ve been making these signs since 2012, with early messages that focused on disseminating information about conditions in Syria. In recent years, their banners have referred to the attacks in Paris, the Boston bombings, Robin Williams’ death, and other breaking news stories in the US; these messages share condolences, but demand to know why the media provides no similar coverage or respect for the suffering in Syria. For example, they voiced support for Caitlyn Jenner: “Caitlyn! We would write Kafranbel with a C, if it meant like you, we would be free. Maybe Cafranbel?”
Residents of Kafranbel have been shouting for help for years, and with this exhibit, their voices have been amplified on Yale’s campus. But Davenport’s Kafranbel show is not the only refugee art that Yale has seen recently. As student activists have turned to art as a way to humanize the crisis, refugee voices have surrounded campus. They reach out like quiet intimate whispers, demanding not just awareness but empathy, forcing the Yale bubble to become just a little less insular.
Refugees have been present in the New Haven community for years—one that has been largely invisible to Yale students. New Haven resident and Yale Refugee Project (YRP) treasurer and future co-president Maria Melchor, MC ’18, admitted that even she hadn’t known about the diversity of refugee voices so close to campus. “I didn’t know that there were refugees from all over the world in New Haven,” she said. Through the YRP and a summer internship with Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services (IRIS), a New Haven-based refugee resettlement agency, Maria has heard just a small number of those stories after being paired with a local refugee to be friends. She stressed the important aid that students have been providing through the YRP, simply by introducing refugees to local culture and making them feel a part of the community.
Looking forward, Maria shares that YRP will continue fostering these individual friendships that expose Yale students to the heavily personal side of refugee issues, but also sees the need to spread awareness beyond just students involved in the group. “I’m very pro-advocacy,” she said. She mentions teach-ins, publicity, anything to contribute to awareness that is spreading around campus.
Students Organize for Syria (SOS) is another campus organization that has already been focusing on advocacy, specifically through artwork. The group organized the Davenport exhibit, and just a few weeks earlier, an exhibit in Silliman. Zunaira Arshad, BR ’17, member of SOS, shared that these art events have been some of her favorites. “They really engage students in a personal way. Exposure makes you remember.”
The exhibit in Silliman was intensely emotional, featuring work by Mohamad Hafez, local artist and architect at Pickard Chilton. Hafez came to the United States for graduate school in architecture, but he was born in Damascus and raised in Saudi Arabia. He began to make art out of homesickness, as a way to recreate the place that he so sorely missed. As the crisis in Syria has worsened, his artwork has morphed to reflect that. At first, he worked mostly with cast plaster on fairly flat surfaces, but now much of his work is three-dimensional and incorporates various found objects.
“The nature of the conflict demands that pieces of my work jut out and have more moving energy.” Streetscapes of bombed out Syrian apartment buildings captured the dynamic devastation that Hafez aims for. Made up of mismatched slabs of stone, with cracked edges accented by plants with twig-like stems that extend unevenly down like roots, the model seems torn from the ground. There are no people in the model, only faces faded into windows and towels hanging to dry like ghosts, unseen at first glance. Across from the streetscape, four boxes jutted out from the wall, with only tiny slits on the edges where two sides did not completely meet. Within lay scenes of violence, guns, and stray words. Hafez’s work simultaneously conceals and reveals the cruelty in Syria.
With his personal roots in Syria, watching the conflict unfold has been emotionally draining for Hafez. “As a Syrian, it’s very tough to see your country in this misery.” He said that the work is “very meditative” and some points even necessary to maintain his sanity, but creating this art takes its own kind of toll on him. As a homesick graduate student, he made art to remind himself of Syria’s beauty, but now his violent streetscapes have a different effect: “You’re remodeling the destruction of your home… I make art that sometimes I collapse in front of.” Despite how devastating this process can be for Hafez, he does not even consider the possibility of stopping. “If the price is discomfort, stress, and long nights for me, then I’m willing to take on the responsibility.”
He explained this devotion to his work with his faith in the power of his art—a unique power that he doesn’t see in other modes of discourse, like politics. “What you realize is when you talk politics, you immediately lose the attention of everybody,” he said. “Art can help you see the world through refugee eyes, engulf you, transport you.” He shared stories of countless times people have approached him after shows to express how moved they were, having finally seen the human faces of the conflict in Syria—even people who had previously known next to nothing about the conflict. “I’m banking on the common denominator of humanity, so that needs to speak to everyone.”
Hafez affirmed again and again that the purpose of his work is to speak to people in this way and encourage empathy. “My purpose is to raise awareness. This is not commercial art,” he said. He welcomed work from many different artists in the Silliman show, exposing Yale students to a variety of refugee expressions and showing them how talented refugees were. This impression struck from the first step into the show. A blank wall hung with strands of paper boats strung together by fishhooks faced the entrance. “Each of the paper boats was made by a refugee family,” Hafez said. Together there were 120 paper boats, each one representing 62 refugees who drowned crossing the Mediterranean between 2014 and 2016. In addition to the paper boats, Hafez invited Maher and Wurood Mahmood, Iraqi artists and siblings who live in New Haven, whose photographs, drawings, and paintings exposed the Iraqi refugee experience. Hafez even include student work, including a photograph of a small boy crying outside of a clinic in a refugee camp that Arshad had taken her freshman year.
The photograph came from a spring break trip to the Syrian border with Hafez, Arshad, and several other students. Arshad had been struggling to comprehend the situation in Syria for a while. “For me, as a freshman who’d only heard about Syria in the news, it was only an abstract concept. I was disillusioned with media coverage and I wasn’t getting a clear picture,” she said. She’d looked to Yale for help first, but given the dangers in the area, received no aid. So, with Hafez, she gathered a group of students and fundraised independently to buy medicine to distribute at clinics in refugee camps. On the trip, they visited these clinics everyday. While planning, Arshad began to realize not only the depth of her own investment in spreading awareness about conditions in Syria, but also that other students shared her passion. Thus, Students Organize for Syria (SOS) began to form; the organization has since spread to universities around the country.
SOS, YRP, and other groups now strive to share with any student at Yale the personal awareness that Arshad’s trip to Syria gave her. The Silliman and Davenport art exhibits are only the most recent advocacy work for refugees on campus. This past December 285 flags marked the grass on Cross Campus; each individual flag stood for 50,000 lives uprooted by the conflict in Syria. In February, the European Student Conference (ESC) introduced a Dutch street art project called #MovingPeople to Yale. With #MovingPeople, miniatures of refugees sat on ledges in Bass, on outdoor benches in residential colleges, unobtrusive, seen by accident or with purpose by those who were looking. Each miniature was a person with a story and a name—Alex, Inas, Lin, etc. ESC was a political conference, gathering students, professors, and policymakers from universities across the U.S. and Europe to propose measures that the European Union might enact, but with the incorporation of #MovingPeople, the conference acknowledged the less political, more human side to refugee struggles.
This human side is critical to an understanding of the refugee experience, and everyday it seems harder to achieve amidst increasingly xenophobic political rhetoric. But, exhibits and art installations can provide glimpses of insight, rather like the cracks in Hafez’s four boxes in the Silliman exhibit that revealed the violence within. Art can expose a sliver of the humanity underlying the refugee experience in a way that encourages empathy. This empathy is crucial for students personally afflicted by the conflict. Hafez said that many “struggle with ways to raise awareness for their own region”—a struggle that he himself shares. Ultimately, he hopes and believes that he has found a successful way to raise awareness. “I’m not able to change the world, but I’m able to enlighten a few people around me…You can only fight ignorance with knowledge and awareness.” Arshad also remains hopeful that students will gain this vital understanding that is the only way to respect the severity of the crisis and to support support the students afflicted. Arshad ended our interview with an appeal: “When issues like these are so prevalent, when we have an opportunity to engage, that’s something we should cherish, constantly make ourselves prioritize.”
Source: yaleherald.com