Saturday, May 4, 2013

Political art beyond the picturesque



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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