'JUST LIKE DAMASCUS'

Berlin's wild charms make it first choice for Syrian artists.

From sculptors to actors and filmmakers, Berlin has become a magnet for Syrian artists fleeing their country's brutal violence to a place where they can express themselves without fear.

While Beirut and Paris have long been the destinations of choice for Arab artists, the German capital has in recent years earned a reputation as a more adventurous, progressive alternative for exiled creators.

As well as offering affordable spaces to live and work, Berlin is "the city of anarchy and rock", says Ziad Adwan, an actor and director who arrived two years ago after spells in jail back home.

Once divided by its infamous wall, reunification energised Berlin as young people who grew up yearning to escape the stifling former East Germany met West German peers who had moved to the city for its special status that exempted them from military service.

The combination produced an open-minded atmosphere -- and an uninhibited party culture -- that continues to lure artists from all over the world.

Syrians have proved to be no exception.

"The Berlin cultural scene has certainly taken on a new tone," says Syrian Ali Kaaf, who has lived in Berlin for the past 16 years and teaches at the well-regarded Weissensee fine arts school.

He helps around 20 refugee students each semester to find places in art schools, put together portfolios or recreate those lost in the chaos of their escape and arduous journey to Europe.

'JUST LIKE DAMASCUS'

Once the essentials of life -- having a place to sleep and food to eat -- are out of the way, many of the new arrivals find themselves among familiar faces.

"Some of my students from the Damascus drama school where I used to teach now live in refugee homes," says Adwan.

"It's just like Damascus here," agrees photographer and journalist Doha Hassan, who has found old friends and acquaintances from the Syrian capital among her 600,000 compatriots who have fled to Germany since the war broke out in 2011.

Still, Egyptian Basma El-Husseiny says that "it can be very hard for those who have just arrived to find their way" to resuming their studies or exhibiting works in German institutions.

An activist with two decades of experience in the arts, she founded the charity Action for Hope that helps refugee artists through the thicket of German bureaucracy.

Meanwhile, Adwan and German publisher Mario Muenster have come together to produce an English-language magazine, A Syrious Look, aimed at linking up the new Syrian diaspora with young German artists.

OUT IN THE OPEN

What refugee artists have to express is often marked by the war within Syria's borders -- and by their own experiences on the long road to escape that conflict.

Under Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the ruling Baath Party ideology was forced on art schools, and some artists say the institutions were also riddled with corruption.

"Artists used to use symbols" to criticise the powerful for fear of the censors, Adwan says. "Today, they can just try things out openly."

One of the works by artist Sulafa Hijazi shows a woman's naked body, supine and legs splayed as she gives birth to a rifle.

Another illustration features a skull-topped sewing machine stitching red thread into a camouflage uniform.

Some creatives have gone through subtler transformations.

"I used to write dark, depressing pieces," muses Rasha Abbas, a writer who won a grant from a foundation in Stuttgart.

"It seems strange but since I'm here, my writing is full of humour," she says, a smile playing across her face framed by waves of dark hair.

Some comfort on the path into an unknown future is the fact that they are living in a city, Berlin, which has had to reinvent itself from scratch.

"Damascus today is how Berlin was at the end of the war," Muenster says.

"No one can imagine that Damascus could be a capital of culture in 50 years, but no one could have imagined that for Berlin in 1945."

YOUSSEF ABDELKÉ

YOUSSEF ABDELKÉ Bleak and Black Opening: 10 November 2016 Ausstellung: 11 November 2016 - 14 January 2017 

Youssef Abdelké Born in Qameshli (Syria) in 1951. Studies at the Faculty of Arts, Damascus, 1976. Studies at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, 1986. PhD  in Arts, Université Paris VIII, 1989.

 He lived and worked in Paris as from 1981 until his return to Damascus in 2005. After 25 years of compelled exile and of being forbidden to go back to Syria, it was finally possible for  him to go to Damascus in 2005 and to organise a large exhibition there. Since 2010, his Syrian passport was confiscated and he could neither exit the country nor return to France where his wife and daughter live. 

The works of Youssef Abdelké are in a large number of museums and institutions, including The British Museum in London and the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris. Youssef Abdelké was arrested in Syria on the 18th of July 2013 by the régime forces, and liberated five weeks later on the 22nd of August. 

YOUSSEF ABDELKÉ by Alain Jouffroy A great observer of living phenomena, a meticulous, disciplined and methodical engraver, yet also a poet with images, Abdelké first depicted groups of humans wearing masks over their faces, actors looking for authors, just like Pirandello’s characters. He placed them in the night, a terribly dark night, where death and monsters were omnipresent. That was his ‘human comedy’, a tragic comedy from which the grotesque was never excluded.

Humans progressively disappeared whilst animals and plants loomed from that same night. Their presence is so significant that you can almost touch them or skim them with the eyes.

There is no hyper-realism in all this, not even ‘realism’, in the traditional sense of that word: everything happens as if he was re-inventing, with each line, nature, a sort of encyclopedia of natural phenomena which is done with care and at a slow pace. 

His vision is so intense that you have the impression of waking up from a dream when looking at his works. It is as if you had never really seen, in depth and in relief, what a simple fish is. Abdelké penetrates the skull, or the fish, or a woman’s shoe, just like Michaux ‘entered’ in an apple. Maybe he had ripped apart the fish before reconstituting it.

Hence he never ‘represents’ the fish, the woman’s shoe or the ox’s skull : he ressuscitates them. This is his power to fascinate : everything is destined to die and to disappear, yet everything can be saved, as if from a deluge. Each living phenomenon is a material miracle, a treasure and an enigma. Such a surprise it is when you rediscover it ! I do not know how he manages in order to reach it. Observation and the utmost attention are not enough.

 Everything happens as if he wanted to re-invent the world, protect it for good from offence, indifference and omission. It is as if he was himself dead in front of the ox’s skull and that he wanted all living phenomena to replace him, the Syrian engraver. It is not ‘Abdelké’ who interests him but rather everything that Abdelké isn’t, everything that will survive to Abdelké and everything that goes beyond, far beyond, Abdelké. I am sure that Baudelaire would have been impressed by his engravings and that he would have dedicated them poems and enthusiastic texts.

There will always be day, night, and light, at least for another couple of billion years or so, and there will always be darkness. It is in that light and in that darkness that Abdelké works, similar to a candle’s glimmer, a simple little candle, flickering in its candle-holder. When he reaches this result, which I call resurrection, he smiles, he is happy, he stops and puts down his chisel ; no point in adding anything. It lives or it doesn’t live. It emerges, it re-emerges or it does not emerge.

The entire question of art lies there. Actually, the word ‘art’ is inadequate. It is not a matter of art, but rather of a metamorphosis of death into a live existance. Abdelké’s fish is not a fish : it is an arrow, a beam, a breath, a whispered call to life. Yet it is also a fish – I don’t know maybe a salmon, a sardine or a pike. But it flies like a bird in the night in which we find ourselves once again immersed. In a large charcoal drawing on canvas, he drew the head of a fish in a box and that massive head stares at us, as if the image of death was more alive for Abdelké than that of life. King of Darkness. 

Profile of Syrian painter Youssef Abdelké (Syria Today Magazine) Artist Youssef Abdelké’s highly acclaimed work is renowned for its sinister undertones and unique symbolism which expose the brutalities of life. Based in Paris, the Syrian painter breaks with tradition through his unique approach to still life drawing. His intriguing works have turned heads the world over, selling in such international auction houses as Christie’s and Sotheby’s.

In addition, his long-awaited exhibition in Damascus in December 2007 generated huge interest among art lovers. Trivial items such as a nail, a fish or a shoe are the focal point of Abdelké’s works. “In order for a bone fragment, a dish or an empty sardine to do what a king and his horse or a woman and her possessions usually did, the artist is required to exert exceptional efforts and to display great skills,” art critic Emil Manaem writes in his introduction to Abdelké’s book. “In his drawings, Abdelké allows simple things in life to impose their sovereignty over spaces, pushing them from the very beginning from the realm of realism to the realm of symbolism."

According to Manaem, true artistic talent does not reveal itself in the way a fish is drawn or the manner in which its details are captured, but in its power to make the fish an expression or a symbol of life. “A fish embodies free movement and the vast sea. In the fish, there is both coherence with place and the impossibility of living outside it,” writes Manaem.“

In its eternally wide-open eyes, there is a blatant challenge and condemnation of death.” When the fish is depicted sliced open or pierced by nails, the brutality of this image conveys an underlying message about the world. Symbolism has always been integral to Abdelké’s vision. His early ink drawings were full of symbols expressing clear-cut political messages. The ‘People’ series from the 1980-90s expressed oppression in the Arab world with its images of jails, guards, crowds of people and horses. “I revealed the darkness I felt inside in my ‘People’ series,” Abdelké said. “This helped me move on to more positive and peaceful projects"

However, Abdelké’s harsh style and severity of subjects remained, even in his still life drawings in the form of skulls, bones and sharp knives. “Artists can’t change their skin even if they change their subject matter,” Abdelké explained. Abdelké’s concept of space has however changed. “I’ve been inspired by the philosophy of people in South East Asia. They see man as a small part of the universe; space in their paintings reflects the huge space we have in our universe. Europeans on the other hand, see man as the centre of the world, that’s why you find their paintings full of people and elements,” Abdelké said. 

Abdelké now integrates both European and Eastern perspectives into his paintings. “Europeans developed scientific rules for perspective so that things would look the same as in reality,” Abdelké said. “Easterners like the Arabs, Turks, and Chinese ignore perspective; they paint the most important elements of their paintings in a bigger size regardless of how they see look in reality.” Finally, after more than 20 years of living and working in France, Abdelké is returning to Syria. “Unlike many of my friends, I never planned to settle down in Paris,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to come back to my homeland, Syria.”