Artists with refugee experiences have produced some of the worlds most celebrated works of art and yet refugee artists continue to be pigeon-holed and compartmentalised. Kagan Guner challenges the very notion of refugee arts.
The role of art and the artist in society plays an important part in shaping our grasp of human history and in forging the identity of a society. In this context, the artist is a producer and, most importantly, history maker; because he or she is a unique individual who is able to reproduce the present time. Thus, we define the artist in terms of his or her ability to produce.
My own work as a painter attempts to reflect collective consciousness. However, as I write this, I am aware that I exist in a society whose mainstream cultural theorists invite me to define my art as refugee art and define me as a refugee artist, reminding me to accept my multiculturalism: all because of my personal background. Unfortunately, I will not accept this! If pushed, I can accept being described as an artist with a refugee background but I cannot find room for myself in the term refugee artist. Ironically, many artists in history including Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Goya, Klee and Kandinsky were refugees and, after World War II, modern art history was written mostly by refugee artists. Can we imagine the absurdity of labelling the art of Picasso or Goya as refugee art? So why does the Anglo-Saxon cultural élite need to make a specific categorisation of refugee art?
Outsider art
Before answering this simple question I would like to share just two of my own personal experiences. Once, as I was returning from my exhibition in Bologna in Italy to London by train, the inspector, suspicious of my art case, asked to me to open it. When he had seen my original works and my Turkish passport, I was detained. I was told this was because there are no artists in Turkey and I had stolen those illustrations to sell them in Paris. Alas, I was forced to give them a brief history of Turkish modern art. In the end they believed me when I showed them my exhibition catalogue.
In 1993, I was selected as an official UNICEF artist. I received a letter from the UNICEF committee wanting to place my painting in their Islamic Collection. I politely replied that since UNICEF did not have a Christian or Buddhist Art Collection, I did not understand why they needed to create an Islamic Art Collection. If they wished, they could place my painting in the main UNICEF collection only. My painting was duly accepted for the UNICEF collection.
In brief, in every step of my life I have been counted as a refugee artist. This simply means outsider and is a product of the problematic mentality of Anglo-Saxon orientalism which yearns for the other in order to define itself. I suppose this is the theoretical background of the terms refugee art and multiculturalism.
This category of refugee art or, more absurdly, the definition of ethnic minority arts, builds up distances and barriers between the artists with refugee or ethnic backgrounds and stops them from taking their place in BritArt. In my view, British art sector leaders and planners dont realise the potential of artistic production in this country. (Personally I havent seen any artist with a refugee background in a management position in any refugee art project.)
New modernity
On the other hand, multiculturalism, as applied by the arts élite, does not mean the collection and placing of different cultures next to each other in a metropolis. The crucial factor in attempting to expose people to different cultures is interrelation and equality between those cultures and the synthesis that comes out of this combination. If you dont have a synthesis it is impossible to say such work represents a multicultural society. There are real multicultural societies in the world: Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Palestine, Turkey, and so on ironically often the same places targeted by the West in attempts to export democracy.
I am hoping that, in the near future, cultural leaders will come to prominence who are willing to tackle the question of the integrity of cultures, and that they will understand that modernity escaped the boundaries of the Western hemisphere a long time ago and landed in Asia and Latin America. Artists with a refugee background are the signifiers of this reality in Western world today. There is no doubt that they are Angelus Novus a reference to a Klee painting that Walter Benjamin talks about in his article, Theses on the Philosophy of History. He describes it thus:
&Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.1
Barriers
Artists with refugee backgrounds or Angelus Novus are no longer part of society because of the invisible barriers and linguistic formation identifying them. But they definitely represent progress, and the storm from paradise is taking them to the future. The paradise is our unfinished work of modernity and it will be the decision of the cultural decision makers in the West to realise this or not.
Kagan Guner is an Artist and Lecturer in Turkish Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Some of Kagan Guners work features in the Museum of Londons new exhibition Belonging: voices of Londons refugees. This free exhibition runs until 25 February and explores the contribution that refugees make to London.
w: http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk
1. Benjamin, Walter and Arendt, Hannah (1999) Illuminations, Pimico
The culmination of five years work for artists group Virtual Migrants, a new online project explores varying experiences of asylum in a globalised post-9/11 world. Containing moving image, video, interactive multimedia, photography, audio, music, installation and collaborative practice, Exhale includes the work of over 40 culturally diverse and emerging artists alongside established figures such as Keith Piper. These include 4D, a Glaswegian hip hop group whose young members migrated from Iran, Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe and Russia, and Kurdistani poet Khasrow Mustafa. Exhale includes a DVD, an audio CD and a booklet with essays, images and contexts. w: http://www.virtualmigrants.com/exhale