DAILY OCCURRENCES
An artist and a poet collaborate
For the opening days of a seven-week-long exhibition titled Syria’s Art of Resistance, artist Mohamad Omran and poet Golan Haji added a new artwork to the show at the Rundetårn in Copenhagen, in spring 2013. The starting point of each piece was a conversation between the pair about art, literature, music, friends, family and the events taking place in Syria. Their discussions took on a workshop atmosphere in the attic studio that they occupied during their March residency at Korridor No. 33, an art, literature and multimedia space.
Each new artwork represents a joint venture between text and illustration. Sometimes the two disciplines were engaged simultaneously; in other cases, the text commented on or was born from the drawings. On many levels, the finished work elucidates the relationship between art and conflict, exile and belonging.
Simon Darø Kristensen, Korridor No. 33
Eyes
At noon, the wind is silent.
The curtain is a banner; time has obliterated the letters.
Behind it, two eyes are scanning
an alley, empty
as a long trench for castrating the dead.
Helicopters are flying away.
Parachutists are ejected like the sperm of rapists.
The present is an eye with amputated lids.
The glance is bleeding.
The sun in the south is a merciless eye,
an eye of a fevered Cyclops.
Two hands on the balcony feel its heated rails
like someone in a circus clutching the bars of a cage,
one half of which has disappeared.
The shadows that striate your blue nightgown
will not vanish when you hide again.
Shadows imprison you.
Eyes, 2013, 59 x 83 cm, Ink on paper
The Voyeur
Through two holes from the heart of the tree,
light is looking at us
like a child who plays with pictures
and whose name is Death,
seeing how flowers were plucked
with their roots uprooting our bones.
In cities erected from the voices of the dead
are places we will not enter because they are like us
– distant and cheap –
are numbers that raise their heads and spoil the conversations.
We were rooms on the roof of the world
that light built from silence,
rented by penniless students and construction workers,
always shaded
by many dirty words.
Translated from the Arabic by Golan Haji
in collaboration with Jesper Berg and Stephen Watts
The Voyeur, 2013, 59 x 83 cm, Ink on paper