Khaled Barakeh
Shattered Image of Oneself, 2022
The artworks is part of the site-specific participatory art project and exhibition Design of Necessity that took place at Maria Church in Copenhagen in 2022.
The works in Design of Necessity depict the creative, everyday practices that Syrians developed with ordinary objects under siege, living in cellars, shelters, and barren hiding places. To be used as solar cookers to heat up food and boil water, they fixed shards of broken glass to the inside of satellite dishes to harness and concentrate the sun’s rays. Confined underground, they learned to grow mushrooms into packaging, which flourish even in minimal conditions and which became a crucial source of nutrition.
The project began in a five-day workshop in May 2022, which brought the artist and twelve Syrian asylum seekers and activists in Denmark together. Mimicking what Syrians developed under sieges, they broke mirrors into shards, which they then fixed to the inside of satellite dishes. Later, each took a self-portrait using their reflections in the shattered, recomposed mirrors on the satellite dishes.
These portraits communicate the shattered images of selves and communities that Syrians carry after years of political repression, siege, starvation, forced disappearance, and forced displacement. The photographs also serve as a reminder that Western media rarely, if ever, represent Syrians as a complete image: either victims or threats, Syrians are not permitted to appear as full, complex human beings.
Khaled Barakeh (1976 Damascus, SY – Berlin, DE)
Khaled Barakeh is a Berlin-based conceptual artist and cultural activist. Driven by his observations of longstanding social injustice, Barakeh approaches creative practice as a tool for societal change; manipulating commonplace visual and cultural touchstones to expose and undermine stagnant power structures. In a recent major shift in his practice, Barakeh developed coculture in 2017 - a non-for-profit umbrella organisation with a suite of initiatives that leverage artistic thinking to directly address issues of contemporary mass migration. Among these projects is the SYRIA Cultural Index and the Syrian Biennale.
Barakeh graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Damascus, Syria, in 2005, completed his MFA in 2010 at Funen Art Academy in Odense, Denmark, and a Meisterschuler study in 2013 at the Städelschule Art Academy in Frankfurt, Germany. He has exhibited at Hamburger Kunsthalle, The 11th Shanghai Biennale, The Frankfurter Kunstverein, Salt Istanbul, The Busan Biennale, State Gallery of Lower Austria, Krems and MKG Hamburg, among many others.
