Julie Reintjes

Omar Imam is a Syrian artist who is currently based in Amsterdam. He left Damascus – where he made video art under a pseudonym – in 2012 and now has refugee status in The Netherlands.

Omar’s diverse artworks are about influencing unexpected audiences and re-appropriating the word refugee in order to alter people’s perceptions. His photographs and installations explore the wide spectrum of refugee identities through surreal aesthetics, cathartic collaboration, narration of the minutiae, and disruption of hegemony-dominated public space.

His photographic project Live, Love, Refugee (2015) is the outcome of a collaboration with people living in a refugee camp in the Beqaa Valley of Lebanon. The aim of the project is to represent Syrian refugees not with numbers, reports, or statistics. Instead, it questions humanitarian data collection and dominant media tropes.

The analogue monochrome photographs are playful and at the same time realistically sparse. People pose against bright backgrounds: white tents, beige rocks, cold snow, barren soil, and blinding skies. The uncanny neatness of the modelled compositions de-stabilises the usual chaos that is associated with refugee camps and migration. The images are potent precisely because of their quietness; contrasted against the loudness of wars.

The kaleidoscope of identity representations illustrates each person as a semi-mythical character in charge of their own dreams, thereby addressing the complexity and variety of refugee life. Rather than reducing refugeehood to a monolithic symbol or consumable humanitarian product, the photographs – and the performative surrealism of the characters – raise questions rather than provide answers.

The photographs speak to us as viewers through aesthetics, rather than the (aesth)ethics that are entrenched in much visual human rights discourse thus far. Well-known historical artworks that acted as moralistic domains of knowledge in which the horrors of human rights violations were disseminated are Turner’s Slave Ship and Picasso’s Guernica. Both caused global controversy and alleged universal sympathy, but merely illustrate human suffering in an abstract manner.

In 2019, I paid a visit to Omar’s studio at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. It is a spacious, calm room disrupted by a life-size epoxy sculpture of a man with a fish head standing proudly in its centre.

Slightly baffled by the contrast between this installation and the photographs that make up Live, Love, Refugee, I asked him how much importance he places on the visual outcome of his work. He said:

“The final visual aspect is something I care about a lot, because I am not a journalist or a researcher: what I make is art.”

Omar values a specific aesthetic counter-narrative. He explained that the primary focus in existing visual narratives is on the physicality of human bodies:

“But you never see stories, memories, a sense of humour, or personal taste.”

Omar said that his work differs vastly from popular media images:

“For sure, those bloody images have a huge impact on the general viewer, but I don’t believe people would like to see them every day. As an artist you need a fictional way of expressing yourself. And you need to be aware of not creating illustrative work. You must create space for the audience.”

He continued:

“I’m trying to create work that gives you positive energy, but at the same time addresses the conflict in the Middle East.”

Omar referred to his work as fictional documentary. He told me:

“I always start from real life, from society, from war, the news: and then I bring it somewhere else.”

Omar believes that provoking outrage through the depiction of suffering does not fruitfully address human rights issues. An example of such provocation in contemporary art is the photograph of Chinese Artist Ai WeiWei’s body washed ashore on a Lesvos beach: a re-enactment of Alan Kurdi’s death. The image has been criticised for romanticising human tragedy and rights violations with artistic stylisation. It does not disrupt perceptions or criticise the political system that harvested the death in question. It maintains a universalised ethical logic of perception, rather than stimulating social change by shifting this logic.

Live, Love, Refugee achieves a shift in logic: it is socially engaging and nonetheless disruptive of dominant discourse. The photographs challenge universal values by dismantling existing categories such as the saver and the victim, the humanitarian and the refugee, the citizen and the stateless.

I asked Omar if he was still in contact with any of the people in his photographs. He responded positively:

“I went back and put up an exhibition in the camp. By installing the photos on the tents, the refugees living there were able to see the work. Discussing conceptual art with them was something I enjoyed. Usually, if you’re an artist, you live in an art bubble, and you discuss your art with your art friends. I always think art should be for everyone, especially for the people who are not looking for it, because it’s a way of communicating.”

In bringing the artworks back to their place of creation, the tents in the camp take on a double function: they are at once temporal spaces of habitation and canvases on which memories and dreams are projected. The tents thus visualise the liminal act of waiting in refugee camps, and at the same time embody an active process of memory-making.

At the time of the interview, Omar was working on a 15 metre high sculpture named Space Refugee for which he showed me the preliminary sketches. He explained that he wanted to install it outside, next to the road, where it would be publicly visible to passers-by:

“If I’m making work to provoke more open-minded attitudes, I’m reaching the wrong audience. People who come to my exhibition openings are mostly open-minded already. So then I’m telling people what they already believe. But the far-right voters don’t come to my openings. There is a huge gap in society. I enjoy filling this gap; it is a way to shape opinions in society.”

Omar told me about the influence of comics in popular culture, how in 2018 DC Comics officially announced that Superman was a refugee from Krypton who saved the earth. With this narrative in mind, Omar hoped to redefine the term refugee through his Space Refugee sculpture. He told me:

“The motivation I have behind this work is to deepen the meaning of the term ‘refugee’. Is it offensive to call someone a refugee? Many people ask if they can use this word to describe me. For me it’s fine. I know that I left my country because of the war. I got my official residency in the Netherlands from the IND. That makes me a refugee. It is about making the definition less superficial.”

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.

Live, Love, Refugee: in conversation with Omar Imam