Page - 177 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 4/2018

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 4 2o18 Charlotte Bank | Remaking a World 177 and sculpture engage the viewers differently. Yaser Safi mainly works with drawings and etch- ings. While some of his work explore scenes of street life or sports, many images address themes of violence, torture and rape. In these images, populated by mutilated and distorted bodies, it is sometimes difficult to clearly distinguish between the victim and the perpetrator. Thereby the small scale of the drawings and the ephemeral character of the motifs, often depicted in a way that recalls shadows, stands in stark contrast to the disturbing content of these images. Since his arrival in Berlin in 2015, Safi has produced a large number of these works, almost to the point of obsession. As one of the most successful Syrian artists in Berlin, he has participated in several exhibitions in the city and appears to have succeeded in creating conversations about Syria and the violence in the country through around his works. But while these images appear to present as profound need for the artist, he has also confirmed his freedom to choose his subject matter according to his own tastes.15 For the video artist, filmmaker and conceptual artist Ammar Al-Beik, the boundaries between his personal life and the broader political and social context, within which he lives and moves are constantly broken down and renegotiated. For Al-Beik, the notion that “the personal is political” holds very real implications. At the very beginning of the Syrian revolt, he was following events as they unfolded, documenting online activism, while combining this found material with his own images to create multi-layered statements in support of the nascent move- ment for freedom in the Arab world. In his video, Hadinat al-shams (The Sun’s Incubator, 2011), which premiered at the International Film Festival Venice in 2011, the birth of the artist’s daughter is interwoven with the torture and death of a young boy, Hamza Al-Khatib. Hamza Al-Khatib was one of the first prominent child victims of the Syrian uprising, who was arrested for participating in anti-regime protests and tortured to death. His mutilated body, which was returned to his family after his death, was filmed and uploaded onto YouTube by activists as a cry for help in the face of atrocities and blunt violence.16 Watching with increasing incredulousness and shock as these disturbing images intrude upon their private world via international TV coverage, Al-Beik and his wife are witnessing the unsettlement of their world, in which the care for their new-born baby is of central importance. In a desperate attempt to cope rationally with the situation, Al-Beik films himself getting ready to join the protests, carrying his baby with him. But rationality and civil responsibility seems to have lost their effects, demonstrations, care and witnessing are elements of an ongoing cycle that the video refuses to bring to a halt, hope mingles with despair. In a later work, La Dolce Siria (2014), which premiered at the Forum Expanded section of the Berlinale festival in 2015, this initial, if fragile, element of hope is gone. The work is a video collage that use a vast amount of archive material from different sources and found footage. In a fragmented, non-linear narrative style, Al-Beik presents a bitter settle- ment with the brutality of the Syrian regime. Danger and violence permeates the entire 26:51 minutes of the video. While the aggressivity of the regime resonates in footage of a circus lion attacking its trainer (the parallel of Syrian president’s name “Assad”, which means “lion” in Arabic and the actual lion is lost on no informed viewer), even a scene of playful domesticity in which two small boys are carrying a film camera holds a latent danger. The boys are too small 15 See Hugill, undated interview with Yaser Safi. 16 The case received wide international media coverage. See e.g. Stack 2011.