I create drawings, paintings, prints, and sculpture that respond to literature, history, and human rights issues, both past and present. My interest in depicting the victims of war and persecution began as a child, when I discovered my grandfather’s collection of World War One photography. These stark images of brutality and industrialised destruction shattered any boyhood illusions of war as a heroic game.
I am drawn to photography’s ability to both suspend time and suggest movement, and I seek a way to use art to create works that are both static and fluid. In the last several years I have focused on responding to contemporary images, shared on social media, of civilians affected by the conflict in Syria. Unlike the Holocaust, whose horrors were revealed to the wider world after the camps were liberated, photos and videos of the civilians murdered by the Syrian regime are being shared in real-time, for everyone to see. I feel that there is an inherent ephemerality to media shared on Twitter and Instagram, and I attempt to reflect on these quickly scrolled-by images through the time-consuming act of drawing and painting. Often, my work has abstracted the photographic source image enough so that it can bypass social media’s graphic content filters, and be shared freely on the Internet as well as in publications, exhibitions, and documentary films.
Many of my paintings and monotypes depict the ‘Caesar Photos’. These are digital images of thousands of corpses secretly captured by a Syrian military photographer known only by the codename Caesar. These photos, taken between 2011 and 2013, document the death by torture of over 11,000 Syrian civilians. In August 2013, Caesar risked his life to smuggle these images out of Syria via a thumb drive hidden in his sock. As the digital photographs are extremely graphic, I have focused on using ‘analog’ charcoal and pigment as a way to both emotionally process the disturbing material, and allow a wider audience to bear witness to these war crimes.
Alongside these Caesar paintings/prints, I draw weekly images of one of the 100,000 disappeared Syrian civilians – my friend, Mazen al-Hamada. Mazen was arrested by the Assad regime in 2012 for attempting to smuggle baby formula to a besieged suburb of Damascus. He was tortured for a year and a half before being released in September 2013. After his release, Mazen was given asylum in the Netherlands, and spent the next seven years tirelessly recounting his nightmarish experiences in government detention, and advocating for his fellow detainees. Mazen and I became friends in 2017 after we were introduced by documentary filmmaker Sara Afshar. In 2020, Mazen lost his refugee status in the Netherlands, and was lured back to Syria with the promise of releasing more detainees. He was arrested at Damascus airport on 23 February 2020, and has not been heard from since. Immediately after being notified of Mazen’s disappearance, I took screenshots of his social media photos before they were erased by the Syrian government. Every week or so I make a drawing based on the screenshots, and share it on social media. Along with the drawing, I include a written memory of Mazen, and the number of days he has been missing in an effort to keep my friend’s story alive.
All Caesar images are oil, charcoal, ink, acrylic on canvas or paper. The Mazen sketches are digital drawings printed on watercolour paper.
