How Syrian artists are livening up Turkey’s art scene
Syrian artists who have come to Turkey found it difficult to find platforms to showcase their work, but this may be changing slowly.
The drawing of a stylized lion’s head dominates the small booth reserved for Arthere — a collective of Turkish and Syrian artists — at Contemporary Istanbul, the city’s huge art fair that brings together dozens of galleries from New York to Tehran to Istanbul every September.
The drawing — black, red and green ink on paper — is called “Haydarpasa,” named after the 19th-century railway station that formed one of the stops of the Orient Express. The lion’s head, with its droopy eyes and all-too-symmetrical mane, is found on the stained-glass windows of the station built during the reign of strategic-minded Abdulhamid II, as the starting point of the Hejaz Railway. Located on the Asian side of Istanbul, the station was designed and built by two German architects — Otto Ritter and Helmuth Cuno — in neo-Renaissance style.
“It is this motif, common in Western architecture, that you see in the Haydarpasa station’s stained glass windows,” explains Omar Berakdar, a Syrian artist who has made Istanbul his home for the last five years. “Haydarpasa is the crossroads between east and west, a symbol of mobility as demonstrated by the Orient Express that takes off from Aleppo, stops at Istanbul and leads to Europe.”
Berakdar’s drawing can be interpreted as a eulogy to the destroyed city of Aleppo — the city where Agatha Christie wrote “Murder at the Orient Express” — and an acknowledgment of lost mobility of the Syrian artists who, as refugees, have little opportunity to travel and work wherever they want.
