Shortly after the protests in Syria began, Bashar Al-Assad’s regime decided to close off the country to foreign media. In the process, it inadvertently helped the Internet to gain a leading role as a source of information and means of coordination for the protest movement, and as a platform for activism, commentary and declarations of solidarity. The role of providing information both in Syria and abroad was soon assumed by young citizens, who went out on the streets, filmed the protests that they were participating in and uploaded the videos to the Internet. They took – and continue to take – considerable risks in doing this. The regime rapidly took up arms against all cameras; anyone with a camera in their hand became a public enemy and was the target of persecution. A video of an activist who continued to film as a sniper aimed at him, and thus recorded his own death, became tragically famous.
Initially the Internet videos were very simple. Shot without complex technology, with the most basic cameras – often with nothing more than a mobile phone – the images were out of focus, shaky, often hard to verify. Yet they carried a powerful message against oppression and rapidly developed into a kind of informal news channel for both Syrian and international audiences as the only available documentation of the spreading protests.
Alongside documentary footage of demonstrations, numerous videos showing creative protest actions also appeared, often infused with a great deal of humour. The fact that the videos were not made by professional filmmakers or journalists, but instead by Syrian citizens, emphasises something of the character of the Syrian revolution as a step towards a new civil society supported by the country’s citizens, people whose hopes have been dashed again and again over the last decade, whilst a small corrupt elite grew ever richer.
At first artists and intellectuals seemed to a large extent to be surprised by this development; artistic works addressing the political situation only appeared at a relatively late stage in the whole process. The protest movement seemed too fragile, and its outcome too uncertain. For a long time, many Syrian artists felt great unease about what was dubbed »revolution art«. There was a widespread view that time and emotional distance were needed to work through the events properly. That may appear surprising in the light of the considerable socio-critical tradition in Syrian art history; artists were however not inactive simply because they did not initially comment on the revolution through artistic work.
In particular within the young, independent art scene, most artists were directly involved as activists, but generally maintained a clear distinction between their activism and their art. As the regime stepped up the violence, and in particular when it became clear that the struggle for a free Syria would be longer than initially hoped, many artists felt a growing need to comment on events in the country in an artistic medium too and to understand art as part of their activism. A series of works were created: photos, drawings and in particular videos, which were uploaded to the Internet and were also conceived primarily for the online community.
These works generally use clear visual language and are free of the codification that was a hallmark of critical art from Syria in the past. The regime’s crimes are explicitly condemned and the works call for the regime to be overturned. However the artists have to keep their identities secret, at least if they are still in Syria. Whereas previously the work was codified, now it is the artists who are encoded. This veil of secrecy can only be lifted in exile. This holds true for the entire Syrian online activist scene. Blogger Amal Hanano (also a pseudonym) expresses this in the following terms: »We have coded ourselves in order to stop speaking in codes. To call things by their name, things like murder, torture, rape, oppression and humiliation. And to demand what we thought we would never dare demand: freedom, justice and dignity.«1
The new videos also deploy a distinct visual language: defined by the impossibility of moving around with a camera in public, they draw on alternative images. Found footage, previously something of an exception in Syrian video and film art, is often used, as are animation und performance. Images are often imposed one upon another, and re-deployed Internet shots of demonstrations are regularly used as a backdrop for animations. An explicit decision is made to keep the techniques used simple; the need to act promptly must remain visible and is transposed to the plane of the visual language.
One of the first of these works, »The Sun’s Incubator«, a video by Ammar Al-Beik, one of the pioneers of the Syrian video scene, interweaves autobiographical details with shots of the protests in Egypt and Syria to create a reflective parable on birth, life and death, hope and struggle. The birth of the artist’s daughter is flanked by the budding hope of change; the atrocious footage, broadcast on television, of Hamza Al-Khatib, a child tortured to death, are contrasted with the day-to-day life of the Al-Beik’s young family, busy caring for their own infant. Al-Beik currently lives and works between Beirut and Dubai, and can therefore show the film under her own name: it was presented for the first time at the 2011 Venice Film Festival.
»Conte de printemps«, a joint work by Mohamad Omran and Dani Abou Louh, was also produced in exile. By superimposing images of protests with drawings of small figures standing up and being trampled down once again, the video is emblematic of the new aesthetic. The history of the hopes associated with the revolution and the way in which it was brutally crushed is narrated here with the most straightforward means, making it particularly striking.
»Liberté«, created by a young artist working under the pseudonym Philip Horani, also comments on the regime’s brutality, in this case through a filmed painting performance. Against a sound backdrop made up of rapid rhythms, protest slogans and shots, Horani sketches out groups of figures with banners, growing denser and denser, superimposed on images of real demonstrators, and in the end the figures are covered with red paint once again. The final image is the Syrian flag, whose two stars assume a shape reminiscent of flowers, thus invoking hope.
As proclamations of faith in ideals such as freedom, civil rights and non-violence, these works find an audience in social media networks on the Internet, are »shared« and forwarded. The artists’ stated aim is to disrupt the pattern that is emerging, where there seems to be a danger of oversaturation with images of violence, and to turn the limelight instead on the people involved in the protest movement.

 

Translated by Helen Ferguson

 

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