Aftermath: in conversation with Shorsh Saleh
Julie Reintjes
Shorsh Saleh is an artist who travelled to the UK eighteen years ago as a refugee from Iraqi Kurdistan. I was able to speak with him last summer after seeing his paintings at the Sink Without Trace exhibition at P21 Gallery, London. In this exhibition, eighteen different artists addressed the theme ‘Migrant Deaths at Sea,’ with death evidently portrayed as the epitome of suffering. As a theme for an exhibition, it negates more positive concepts like resistance-building, life-making, or mutual understanding. Even so, nine of the contributing artists have a forced displacement background, demonstrating their survival.
Shorsh’s four miniature paintings in the exhibition depict origami boats floating, sinking, and breaking through borders. His work differs from Omar Imam - whose photographic series ‘Live, Love, Refugee’ I explored in my previous article in this series - as it explicitly deals with the dangers and deaths associated with migrant journeys.
Shorsh Saleh. Aftermath (2018), natural pigment on paper. Look closely and you will see a miniature of Alan Kurdi. Image courtesy of the artist: © Shorsh Saleh
When I visited Shorsh in his East London basement workshop office, he told me that the theme of ‘death’ in art is:
“... very provocative. The aim is to get public media attention. Besides, it is a reality: people are dying at sea. And we are not talking about history, we are talking about recently, now, the very moment we are showing these images and paintings. For me political art – which is what we are talking about – should be direct. You can’t talk about people dying at sea with abstract images.”
He continued, declaring:
“It’s not always a happy ending for, say, someone like me, who has made it here and is working as an artist. Why are people leaving their countries? Because there is war. And people in Europe need to understand that it is their war, too.”
Here, Shorsh is referring to the fact that many countries have previously invaded and colonised many of the world’s largest refugee-producing nations. Additionally, an overwhelming proportion of the weapons imported into Africa and the Middle East are manufactured by the world’s largest arms exporters: the United States, Russia, France, Germany, Spain, South Korea, China, the United Kingdom, and more. According to Shorsh, our strategies should not merely be reactionary: we shouldn’t be sending hundreds of volunteers and aid workers to the Mediterranean to rescue people at sea. Instead, it should be preventative: we should force our governments to stop trading arms.
When I asked Shorsh whether he thinks the artwork addresses these international relations explicitly, he responded by saying:
“If you ask me whether my art has any impact on public opinion or human rights, I say – on the level of high politics – it doesn’t do much. Art is a very soft tool. You cannot fight politicians with art. So what we artists need to do is raise the awareness of the people on the ground, and hopefully they can pressure our governments.”
At first glance Aftermath (2018) – containing a painted miniature of the washed ashore body of Alan Kurdi – could be criticised for romanticising or exotifying human tragedy. However, Aftermath is a departure from traditional depictions of suffering in contemporary art. Shorsh does not aim to make easily digestible artwork with enforced meaning. Instead, he asks: why are these people’s right to life being violated? What policies have led to this situation?
The traditional miniature techniques and handmade natural pigments, dyes, and papers that Shorsh uses are indigenous to the mountainous area of Iraqi Kurdistan. His paintings are inspired by ancient Kurdish carpet motifs, interwoven with contemporary imagery. Thus, his work has dual power: it is aesthetic as well as shocking, in that it creates dissensus through traditional techniques whilst provoking shock through the subject of death.
Shorsh Saleh. Displacement (2020), naturally dyed wool and cotton. The design uses the traditional Jaff motif, which symbolises mountains. The fading of the motif signifies the disappearance of Kurdish culture through displacement. Image courtesy of the artist: © Shorsh Saleh
Susan Sontag argues that looking at artwork about other people’s pain in an art gallery is exploitative. I feel it is more powerful to dismiss the moralistic emphasis so entrenched in visual human rights discourse. Instead, we should focus on the artist’s desires of expression. In many cases, the violent situations which have forced people to flee their homes also threaten the survival of their cultures. Shorsh’s hybridisation of the traditional and contemporary is thus a radical act of cultural heritage preservation as well as a process of identity formation; both which challenge neo-colonial imaginaries entrenched in the visual culture of human rights.
But could these traditional visuals incite the Othering of artists with forced displacement backgrounds? Shorsh mentioned several times that the art world is like an impenetrable cult for artists like him:
“I don’t necessarily mind the term ‘refugee arts’. I am a refugee, and I am an artist. But I was an artist before I was a refugee; I was an artist when I was a kid. The point is that we don’t get taken as seriously as a result of the ‘refugee’ label. It is a term employed to establish barriers between people. It is also harder for artists like me to get funding for the use of traditional techniques.”
However, he explained that he uses his miniature skills because contemporary artistic practices are merging into a single, western entity. He said:
“We have to speak differently. That’s why we are beautiful: because we are different. And that’s why we have to make art: because art is the representation of the soul of our culture. People feel connected to my miniatures because they differ from work by other artists.”
He declared, passionately:
“Art deals with emotions, and people relate to emotions. Thousands of articles about war in the Middle East and North Africa don’t change a thing. But when they see the image of Alan Kurdi, emotionally, people are engaged very quickly. The reason is: people are looking for stories. In my little miniatures there are stories.”
Coskun Aral/Sipa Press (1991). This is the photograph that inspired Displacement (2020). It depicts Iraqi-Kurdish refugees fleeing Saddam Hussein’s attacks in Northern Iraq, heading towards the Turkish border.
Shorsh’s work thus visualises forced displacement in a unique way, thanks to the use of traditional techniques. Although the paintings allude to death and violent realities, they do not sensationalise or objectify refugee bodies. Instead, they subtly tell individual stories that are symbolic of larger human rights issues.
Moreover, the preoccupation of contemporary art with refugee death might prevent important dialogue about refugee life, for example, how forcibly displaced people create worlds and construct meaning. Nevertheless, the experience of forced displacement is likely to include suffering, and even death. Visual refugee discourse therefore can and perhaps should, according to Shorsh, include the difficult themes of death, emotions, and suffering that encompass the individual lives entrenched in these realities.
An extended version of this article was first published as the author’s MSc Human Rights dissertation at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2019.
For examples of contemporary UK-based artists with a forced displacement or migration background check out Traces Project and Counterpoints Arts.
All images courtesy of the artist: © Shorsh Saleh.
A new body of paintings and carpets by Shorsh Saleh is on display as part of the exhibition Refugees: Forced to Flee at the Imperial War Museum between April 2 - November 29, 2020.
Note: exhibition postponed to a later date due to the current public health crisis surrounding Covid-19.