‘Devious silence’: Refugee art, memory activism, and the unspeakability of loss among Syrians in Turkey

ABSTRACT

In the past few years, and especially since the start of the ‘refugee crisis’, a number of research, NGO, and policy initiatives have channelled resources to representing refugees through artistic endeavours. The underlying assumption in such projects is that art offers refugees a significant avenue to tell their story and acquire a ‘voice’ that is otherwise restricted in contexts of limited rights. In this article we aim to complicate some of the straight-forward assumptions underlying the connections between art and the representation of displacement and loss through ethnographic research conducted with professional Syrian artists in Istanbul. With an emphasis on ‘refugee art’, such artistic projects force artists to conform and identify with this category, silencing more complex processes of identification and subjectivity, communal historical continuities and personal loss, as well as artistic aspirations and expressions. The article demonstrates that the aestheticisation of displacement and loss produces an ‘unspeakability’ (Weller, Robert. 2017. “Salvaging Silence: Exile, Death, and the Anthropology of the Unknowable.” Anthropology of this Century 19 [Online publication]. Accessed June 6, 2019. http://aotcpress.com/articles/salvaging-silence/) of personal experience and trauma, and, in some cases, a permanent withdrawal from artistic production. As much as artists experience this as a form of imposed silencing, they also articulate their withdrawal as a tactic of agentive creativity. We, therefore, argue that unlike in the modern art practices described by Sontag (1983 [1982]. “The Aesthetics of Silence.” In A Susan Sontag Reader, 187–188. Harmondsworth: Penguin), this ‘permanent silence’ is not an elitist, individualistic and dehistoricizing strategy. This context of conflict and protracted displacement reveals multifarious silences that are both results of unequal politics of representation but also tactics of reclaiming identity and artistic integrity, and of maintaining continuities between past, present and future.

KEYWORDS:

• Silence
• refugees
• art
• loss
• Syrian
• Turkey

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to all artists who participated in this research, and especially to Arthere for allowing us to conduct interviews and spend time in their premises. We would like to thank the British Academy for funding the broader project, on which this research is based. We are grateful to Annamarie Samuels and Ana Dragojilovic for including us in their EASA 2018 panel on Silences of/and mobility: towards an anthropology of the unspoken and unspeakable, in which we first presented and discussed this work, and for their constructive feedback on the written paper. Many thanks also to Stephen Millar for providing feedback on a number of drafts, Ioannis Tsioulakis for providing insights on the broader issue of art as work, and to the two anonymous reviewers for their comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The research is part of a larger project entitled ‘Counting Our Losses: Social Entrepreneurship, Refugees and Urban Transformation in Turkey’. It is funded by the British Academy under the Humanities and Social Sciences Tackling the UK’s International Challenges Programme and held at Queen’s University Belfast.

2 This was a follow-up and last visit to the field just before the escalation of the Covid-19 pandemic and connected lockdowns in Turkey and across the world. Although the pandemic has had and will be having immense impact on the lives of our research participants, all the material in this article was collected in and reflects a ‘pre-Covid’ era.

3 The language of ‘crisis’ is central in biopolitics that normalize and legitimise states of exception, hierarchies of power, and denial of human rights (Agamben 1998; Athanasiou 2012; Redfield 2013; Roitman 2014). A focus on borders and the crisis produced around them shifts attention to states’ and suprastates’ role in constructing regimes of control and exclusion and implementing business models of profit through bordering (De Genova 2002, 2017; Coutin 2003; Andersson 2014).

4 Although Syrians started fleeing to Turkey in 2011, the numbers peaked after 2013.

5 According to UNHCR, Turkey hosts the largest number of Syrian refugees in the region with more than 3.6 million registered Syrians in the country, and almost a fifth of these living in Istanbul (UNHCR 2018). However, their legal status has been ambiguous, especially in the first years of the war when Syrian refugees were accepted in Turkey as ‘guests’. Due to its limited ratification of the 1951 Geneva Convention, Turkey does not grant refugee status to non-European refugees, and displaced Syrians have not therefore been recognized as refugees through the existing legal framework (Rygiel, Baban, and Ilcan 2016, 1). However, in this article, we refer to our research participants as ‘refugees’, as the term ‘refugee’ is used by our participants and in everyday discourses as a socio-political category.

6 For the broader project and in conjunction with a team of researchers based at the Centre for Migration Research in Istanbul Bilgi University, we conducted collaborative team-based research which focused on Syrian refugees and the politics of labour in Turkey. This mixed-methods research was conducted in 2017–2019 and comprised of a Turkey-wide quantitative survey, semi-structured interviews with refugee groups, NGOs, and social enterprises, and participant observation in Istanbul.

7 Most interviews were conducted in English as the artists are fluent speakers, with the exception of one interview that was conducted in Arabic, with synchronous translation by one of the project researchers for the authors who were also present.

8 One of these artists, Nabil, is the founder and main member of Arthere. The other artists work independently, and through different networks.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a British Academy grant under the Humanities and Social Sciences Tackling the UK’s International Challenges Programme.