Presenting Absence

This conversation records encounters held in 2021 and 2022 between Berlin-based artists from Syria – Guevara Namer and Khaled Barakeh – and two scholars, Anne-Marie McManus and Brigitte Herremans. The conversation critically explores a European context that since 2015 has asked Syrian art practitioners to express themselves through war and refugeehood. Reflexively attentive to academia's complicity in these power dynamics, the conversation dwells on artists' frustration with being asked to speak as symbols of Syria, the latest in a line of Orientalised archetypes of Middle Eastern war for media consumption. As the participants dwell on different forms of absence in art, politics, media, and society, they point to the fragmented and plural nature of Syrian artistic communities in Europe today. Overall, the conversation calls for the recognition of Syrian practitioners' ‘epistemic agency’ in the creation, circulation, and reception of their art.