Issam Kourbaj’s Urgent Archive: A Syrian Heritage on Display
Theo Horch reflects on the recent exhibition of Issam Kourbaj’s work at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge; “The dynamism between human potential and frailty informs the exhibition’s physicality.”
Across three rooms in Cambridge’s Kettle’s Yard, Issam Kourbaj’s “Urgent Archive” displayed an intimate heritage of Syrian culture. Kourbaj’s interdisciplinary work performs with restless vitality and eclecticism, moulded by innovative curation which plays on visitors’ active physicality. Since the initial March 2011 uprisings against President Bashar al-Assad and the ensuing civil war, mass displacement has been a primary consequence of conflict, with this enforced diaspora renovating conceptions of Syrian identity. Kourbaj’s solution, conceived since his first visit to Cambridge in 1989, is ancient: he returns to weeds and soil, with introspective works that take their time to mature.
Kourbaj’s origins in Syria’s fertile Southwest inform his engagement with the natural world, as a lens to both human fragility and resilience. His piece, Is it from a grain of wheat that the dawn of time bursts out … and also the dawn of war? (2023-2024) explicates this duality. Exploded images of single grains magnify the blemishes on their “skin,” tying our humanity inextricably to the land. Yet the power of Kourbaj’s media, suspending the grain on monolithic lightboxes, makes them, to my eyes, stoic and bare-faced. Unknown: Roots and Shoots (2022) captures a snapshot of growth with immediacy, a projection of sprouting seeds reused from his film Despite the Fall (2023). The exhibition note suggests that they represent hope for life, albeit cut short; ironically, they are conjured by human hands into Kourbaj’s artistic vision. Their pairing with a line by Greek poet Dinos Christianopoulos – “they tried to bury us; they did not know we were seeds” – places their evergreen strength in human will.
“Kourbaj is most compelling at the spark of friction between the “urgent” and the “archive,” life and death.”
In manipulating farming paraphernalia, as with the mincing machine and crushed olive seeds in War Machine, Extinct Peace (2024), Kourbaj makes the Syrian land potently symbolic of the grinding inevitability of war. The piece There is no land to till, but charred seeds to bury (2024) engages even more explicitly with the graphic implications of the grain-person metaphor in wartime. The fragmented blade of a plough is hard to reconcile with the vitality which other works of this genre emphasise; Kourbaj is most compelling at the spark of friction between the “urgent” and the “archive,” life and death.
Don’t Wash Your Hands: Before the Quake, Aleppo City and the Citadel (2023), a sculpture of the city made from Aleppo soap, illustrates Kourbaj’s retrospective gaze, while the title is forthright and demanding. Similarly, his Abundant, No Abandoned (2023) powerfully invokes Syrian geography, depicting her “dead cities” on a sprawling map on the floor. The powdered pigment and indigo stones from which the piece is made are the same Kourbaj would have used to blackout his windows as a boy, to obscure his house from bombers during the late 1960s Israeli bombardment of Jordan and Palestine. Kourbaj’s twisting of familiar childhood memories, made uncanny by the effects of conflict, inform his most disturbing work. All But Milk (2023-2024) silently clamours that “the call for ceasefire is embedded not in words, but in objects,” with rows of baby milk bottles filled with discarded remnants for every day of the year: from cast cement to broken pens; from half a tennis ball to barbed wire. To the right of this sobering selection is Capsized (2020), a crushed pram. Lying in the foreground is Urgent Archives: Written in Blood (2019), a collection of abstractly graphic paintings on music scores, classical literature and school workbooks. One defaced page includes notes on Plato’s Republic, invoking Socrates’ allegory of the cave to illustrate the passage from innocence to experience.
“A hidden Syria, underpinned by a nexus of individual relationships to the homeland, runs against the official transcript of life.”
Kourbaj’s imprinting of everyday ephemera is the most evocative aspect of the exhibition. As he notes, “We are all in the same fragile boat in many ways.” The repurposing of familiar belongings grounds the exhibition in the everyday, aiding us to transpose our experience to scenes of displacement and strife. The technique of stamping alone carries powerful connotations of officialdom and recordkeeping, which Kourbaj employs in his exploration of how identities can be both formally and informally policed. The Country Formally Known as Syria (2019) plays on this tension. The piece takes as its basis a geography textbook titlepage; the pun between “Formally,” and the typescript “FORMERLY” stamped above a cohesive silhouette of Syria’s borders showcases Kourbaj’s linguistic wit. Doubtless, a decade on from Ian Jack’s The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain (2009), Syria’s discord, far more extreme than Britain’s since the 1980s (when Kourbaj was enrolled at the Fine Art Institute of Damascus), warrants his dark satire. The specific reference in his 2019 piece is likely being made to the Economist’s February 2013 cover story “Death of a Country,” which famously labelled Syria “a new Somalia rotting in the heart of the Levant”. It remains up to the viewer to consider how Kourbaj might have interpreted the article, which predicted that the nation would “degenerate into a patchwork of warring fiefs,” appealing to Obama to politically “turf out” al-Assad’s family and salvage Syrians shredded by government shelling. Crucially, what is “formally known” – between Syrian state media and the manifestos of closed elections since al-Assad’s re-election in 2014 – is no longer what is “true”; a hidden Syria, underpinned by a nexus of individual relationships to the homeland, runs against the official transcript of life.
Kourbaj relates to this amorphous conception of “identity” with an acute sensitivity, plotting his own relationship to national regimes between passports, permits and postcards. Displays of bureaucratic artefacts from his emigration to the UK juxtapose earthy Syrian pastoralism. The exhibition’s curation aids our understanding of this interplay, layering images of Britain and Syria—past and present—which morph depending on where you stand. In one eclectic arrangement, visitors stand before a computer that plays Kourbaj’s performance STOP THE BOMBS, NOT THE BOATS (streamed to Kettle’s Yard Instagram, April 2024), in which he smashes red bottles to protest against the UK’s Rwanda policy. Surrounding the monitor are scattered postcards which bear British and Syrian stamps, alongside the masterful Arabic calligraphy, Kourbaj’s earliest artistic medium. Red or black imprints from wooden blocks remind of officialdom’s ever-present hand, while their faded impact pales in comparison to the brash, childlike doodles of birds in wheatfields, which hang just as drawings by Kourbaj’s children might hang in a home office.
The array thrills with its intimacy. The curation encourages visitors to crouch or look up to search for pieces, in turn altering their meaning. On one shelf, collections of postcards to the children of Gaza hang, just as photographic film might in a darkroom, with red and black streaks of barbed wire, a snapshot of ongoing suffering there. Sitting above is a birdcage, evoking the apartheid that has held Gazans in a geographical bondage. Written in Blood (2013), one of Kourbaj’s first responses to the Syrian civil war hangs on the other side of the cage. This parallelism displays his empathy playing out in his art. Stooping lower, we see Sole-less (2018), repurposed shoes of children and adults with soles removed, seemingly on a march towards unfired bricks (2024) which are stamped to look like cuneiform tablets. I found this pairing exceedingly moving; the anonymised dead trudge back in time, to an ancient culture tied to the Middle Eastern earth beneath their feet.
“As Kourbaj illustrates, we are at once capable of marvels and yet our lives are fleeting; we are resilient, yet impermanent.”
The dynamism between human potential and frailty informs the exhibition’s physicality. As Kourbaj illustrates, we are at once capable of marvels and yet our lives are fleeting; we are resilient, yet impermanent. In the video of the performance Shores of Power (2019), Kourbaj emerges from the sea carrying mattresses, in reference to migrants who come to Europe’s politically and economically powerful shores. He is Promethean in his impotence, burdened by mankind’s propensity for evil. He shakes his fists at the heavens, his back to us. In another room, mattress springs (Fallen Springs (2023)) brood like barbs, washed-up remnants of the Arab Spring which never materialised. I find this captures the exhibition’s tone, relishing in the renewal of ephemera to produce miraculously effective artefacts which encapsulate Kourbaj’s relationship with various global conflicts.
