By Claire Blood-Cheney, Staff Writer
In times of war, specific narratives tend to emerge from the turmoil while others are buried under the rubble. The war in Syria is no exception. The United Nations reports, “Since the conflict erupted in March 2011, more than five million Syrians have fled the country and six million are internally displaced.” In an attempt to give voices to all those affected by the war, artist Molly Crabapple and journalist Marwan Hisham teamed up to create the art exhibition SYRIA IN INK. This exhibition consists of Crabapple’s ink drawings which connect to passages written by Hisham, in order to give a visually stimulating account of the devastating effects of the Syrian Civil War on the lives of citizens.
Although there is an abundance of news stories and photos of the Syrian Civil War, for Crabapple, photography is an insufficient way to represent the lives of the people involved. Crappable writes, “Oppressors seldom allow cameras into the spaces where they inflict their oppression. The lived experience of those under them disappears into the memory hole. I seek to accomplish with my art what photos cannot.” Indeed, Crabapple’s hand drawn pictures are intimate and one of a kind. Crabapple cites Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and Goya’s “Disasters of War,” a collection of prints depicting Napoleon’s invasion of Spain in 1808, as inspiration for her artwork.
Crabapple began her professional career as a journalist and has covered hot-button issues such as Occupy Wall Street, Guantanamo Bay, the refugee crisis in Greece, and hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico among others. As an activist, Crabapple has done collaborations with social justice organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, The ACLU and The Equal Justice Initiative. Now a distinguished artist with artwork in the Museum of Modern Art, the United States Library of Congress, and the New York Historical Society, Crabapple challenges her audience to sit with their discomfort when confronting her images of deep loss and destruction.
The exhibition is based on a book collaboration between Crabapple and Hisham, a Syrian war journalist as well as a fellow activist and critic of the Syrian civil war. Crabapple and Hisham joined forces on social media once they discovered that they shared a passion for representing the experiences of the oppressed and depicting life in Syrian cities during the various stages of the war.
Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War, the book upon which SYRIA IN INK is based, is co-authored by Hisham and Crabapple. The book follows a young Syrian man who experiences the unfolding of the Syrian war from the beginning and must grapple with the coming of age in a war-torn country. Since his career as a freelance journalist, Hisham has covered events in Syria, Iraq, and Turkey. His writing can also be found in Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The Intercept, and Foreign Policy. Hisham’s personal connection to the war is complicated, as he was at one time exiled from his homeland of Syria. As such, Hisham’s words are that of an individual who has experienced firsthand the havoc wreaked on his country and has also witnessed the violence from the outside looking in. Crabapple and Hisham have created an exhibition that attempts to represent the lives of the people affected by the Syrian Civil War in all of its emotional complexity. Colorful images depicting soldiers, civilians, protests, moments of silence, and moments of fear are drawn with care. These pictures are found within Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War, copies of which are scattered around the exhibit. The task that the two collaborators undertake is not an easy one, but as Crabapple reminds us, “Art is a slippery thing. It can evade censorship, make history visible, invest the hideous with beauty and the prosaic with force.” SYRIA IN INK will be on display in the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery at Haverford from March 22 to April 26.
Photo credit: Claire Blood-Cheney
