Harsh
censorship in the arts after 9/11 was confronted with a sweeping wave of
political expression everywhere in the US, from galleries and talk shows to
films and blogs, especially targeting George Bush. Almost immediately this
politicization spread to the whole art-world, notably the international
exhibitions and fairs, where the vocabulary and ideas associated with
“identity” and “multiculturalism” that had been developed in the ‘80s, were
further elaborated. At its best, this politicization after 2001 concerned
neither “voices yet unheard”, nor “particularities threatened with extinction”.
It challenged the generalized biopolitics of “antiterrorism” and “security”, a
condition of permanent emergency, where everyone is under surveillance,
potentially criminal, indeed guilty until proved innocent.
The political dimension of Serhad Bapir’s engravings cannot be measured against
the standards of “ethnic” and “world” art, nor are they comments against the
security state made from the comfortable distance of a mass-democratic couch.
They needn’t claim local authenticity or legitimization. Serhad’s motives are
clear, as the works bear his stamp of personal commitment from the start. His
image-making has always been political. A political refugee in Greece, he turned
his stress into strength, studying painting and then engraving next to
brilliant teachers like Manolis Yannadakis and his main mentor Xenis Sachinis.
Engraving suits him well, for its high aesthetic and conceptual contrasts, for
its reproducibility, its emphatic respect for the creative process itself, and
finally for its history in emblems and illustration. Engraving enables him to
serve his own lyrical idiom, while not hiding behind an irrelevant and
subjectivist neutrality. He seems to be making icons out of the concept of
one’s “homeland”, which for him is a bloodstained piece of a broader universe
ruled by pain, deprivation and absence. Works like “Kurdistan,
Chechnya, Tibet” (2003), or “Refugees
in the Mediterranean” (2001) and “Self-Determination” (2006) speak
of the remains of hope and sorrow in the paranoia of constant war, a low-level
conflict which covers all spheres of control across the planet.
Some works appear mercilessly specific: “Woman
in a Village that is About to be Destroyed” and “100
Years of Kurdish Journalism”provide arguments to a struggle that is ongoing
on the eastern front, yet is also being fought right next to us – Arivan
Abdullah Osman, an Iraqi Kurd, was badly beaten up by Greek coast guards and
has been in a coma for weeks now [Arivan passed away less than four months
later, on July 27th 2009]; Turks and Kurds are still caught up in the claws of
the 2004 Greco-Turkish bilateral refoulement agreement for returning
immigrants.
With the straightforwardness of a political poster, works such as“Accordance” (2005) and “The
Cry” (2005) choose to offer some allegorical background to the collective vision
of a fairer life.“Survival” , “Return” and “Then” , on the other hand, transform Serhad’s own
enduring nostalgia into memory, a memory that cherishes moments of beauty, and
shelters them from hopelessness and grief.
Lia Yoka
Art Historian
From the newspaper "Macedonia Sunday" May 24,
2009. For the report prints in Vafopoulio Cultural Center of the City of
Thessaloniki (Greece).
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