Julie Reintjes

Khaled Barakeh is a Berlin-based artist and cultural activist whose work explores issues of identity, culture, and history. He grew up in Rif Dimashq, a consevative suburb of Damascus. During compulsory military service in Syria he spent three years forcibly painting the president’s portrait and writing propaganda slogans for the ruling party.

Just like Omar Imam and Shorsh Saleh, whose work I previously wrote about, Khaled Barakeh has visualised his experiences of forced migration by creating physical artworks aimed for display in a gallery context, such as his piece I Haven’t Slept for Centuries (2018). The work is made up of visa, checkpoint, and rejection stamps from his old Syrian passports. Describing the work, he told me:

“I wanted to look at how travel stamps relating to forced migration affect our identities. I collected stamps from my old Syrian passports, and overlapped them so that the original stamps became invisible. The accumulation of stamps is representative of the idea that when you are forced to travel from one place to another, your identity keeps changing. Eventually it disappears, and you cannot see the original identity encoded in your passport anymore.”

Artworks like these, displayed in galleries and museums, destabilise fixed notions of place, identity, and migration. The artworks however - despite their human rights awareness-raising potential - are to some extent inevitably entrenched in a system of consumption, morality, voyeurism, and unequal access. It is therefore important to be critical of the spaces in which these pieces circulate, even if they provide a platform for otherwise marginalised artworks that are themselves unique in their aesthetics, techniques, narration, self-expression, and activism.

With this in mind, Khaled has turned his artistic practice to more socio-political creative projects. He told me that he thinks art can produce social change, but:

“ Not institutionalised, white cube ‘art’. ‘Creativity’ however, can have an impact. At the moment I am working on a project where I am writing the German constitution, in Arabic, in the aesthetic of old Islamic manuscripts. In the West, the Arabic language, despite its primary function as a method of communication free from any inherent connection to ideology, is often viewed as unfamiliar and therefore potentially threatening. For this creative project, Arabic calligraphy and other designs usually associated with the Quran, are used purely as visual tools to illustrate the German Constitution. All paragraphs will be written by Arab communities in Berlin, during a series of workshops, where we will get together to discuss their content. The pages will be printed onto t-shirts and people will wear them in public spaces. This project aims to trigger cognitive dissonance: it questions our societies' foundational structures and highlights the challenges of transitioning between different societies.”

This is an example of creativity that aims to challenge the dominant order and enables new ways of knowing about rights, law, politics, identity, culture, and history. Khaled continues:

“It is not enough to criticise the system from within, or even to criticise the system in general. How can we make the arts more participatory, more socially engaged? Contemporary white-cube practice won’t change people’s lives. Do you remember an artwork that completely blew you away?”

I automatically find my brain floating around a spacious, low temperature, echoey gallery filled with metallic installations, flashing neon lights, analogue projector images, thickly-oiled canvases, and tiny incomprehensible essays on otherwise spotless walls. I think: sure, there are artworks that impacted my life. But maybe - not having visited cultural spaces for months during the Covid-19 lockdown - I am romanticising.

Khaled tells me that there is no artwork that has left a life-changing impression on him. He explains:

“Cinema and books, yes: there are many films that have influenced my life very strongly. Through literature, music, and film, you can temporarily escape into a different reality. Whilst with contemporary art, I’m not so sure. Art institutions create exclusive, intellectual bubbles. Once I had an interview with a curator. She said: ‘I really like what you do, but could you express it in a more sophisticated way?’, and I thought ‘No, I don’t want to. I want to describe what I’m doing in an accessible way, so that my mum, who has no knowledge of the art world, will be able to understand it’.”

In 2017, Khaled founded coculture, a non-profit organisation engaging in projects that sustain the cultures, identities, and dignity of people with a forced migration background. Among coculture’s initiatives is the Syria Cultural Index (SCI): an online platform that aims to map, empower, and connect Syrian cultural producers around the world.

“The Syrian nation is not one community anymore. We are becoming several communities around the world. Syrian refugees living in Germany have completely different challenges, lives, and futures from Syrian refugees living in Jordan, or Canada. Through the SCI, we aim to reconnect our cultural fabric, maintain its production, and prevent it from melting into the new countries that Syrians are living in."

The Syria Cultural Index is an online platform that aims to map and connect the Syrian artistic community in order to support, empower and connect Syrian cultural practitioners scattered around the world.

As Stuart Hall said: “[m]igration is a one way trip. There is no ‘home’ to go back to.” So it is extremely important to preserve culture; especially when it is being erased by war and conflict. Place, home, and roots are deeply moral concepts that need to be understood - and creatively communicated - in a hybrid, transcultural way; because rather than being fixed, diaspora and refugee identities are in constant transformation. Khaled told me that the shift in his artistic practice came with a shift in his identity:

“I tried not to let my refugee status impact my work. What does it mean anyway? It is just a status relating to me legally existing in a particular country. Being a refugee is not an identity, or at least, it shouldn’t be.”

He continued:

“But it became hard to ignore my legal status. It rooted itself in my work subconsciously. Since then I have wanted to reclaim and reappropriate the word ‘refugee’, steering it away from the mainstream media.”

In the art world the adjective ‘refugee’ often functions as a term conferred by the dominant culture as an exotified symbol of representation. When I asked Khaled what he thinks about the label ‘refugee artist’, he responded that he finds it highly problematic:

“The term puts the label before the artwork. The artwork is introduced through my temporary legal status; my essentialised identity. Rather than looking at my artwork for what it is, the audience observes it through a ‘refugee’ filter. It underestimates and disrespects the artwork. Image this: you enter a gallery and the first thing you read is the following description: ‘This artwork was produced by a female artist who was raped two years ago’. This puts the label on the content before the content itself. It can victimise the artist: her identity defined by her past experience of sexual assault. It puts the audience in a higher position.”

In many cases, artists want to be known as artists. Accentuating certain characteristics of artists by showing their work at group exhibitions of Asylum art, Black art, and Arab art under the institutional guise of inclusivity and diversity creates unequal power relations between the artist, the audience, the curator, and the institution. It places the artists within a neocolonial discourse that presumes they do not possess an autonomous status outside the constraints of their origins, ethnicity, identity, or - in the example given by Khaled - their gendered, violent trauma. It becomes the artist’s forced responsibility to represent the experience of someone in a community to which they do not belong.

Of course this does not necessarily need to be the case. Many artists have taken control of their own representation in order to create meaning through accentuating difference. In Khaled’s concluding words, referring to the term and legal status ‘refugee’:

“Today it’s “us”. Tomorrow it might be you. Just like for everyone else, my legal status is my right, and no-one can take it away from me.”

Khaled’s work will be on display as part of the following exhibitions from September 2020:

The Futureless Memory, a group exhibition at Landesgalerie Niederösterreich curated by Dilek Winchester and Katja Schroeder, from September 19 - November 11, 2020.
Spuren und Masken der Flucht, a group exhibition at Kunsthaus Hamburg curated by Günther Oberhollenzer and Georg Traska, from September 12, 2020 - September 26, 2021.

Syria Cultural Index: in conversation with Khaled Barakeh