ART CITIES:Berlin-Walid Siti
Born in Iraqi Kurdistan, Walid Siti lived in the former Yugoslavia before seeking political asylum in London during increasing aggression against those opposed to Iraq’s Ba’athist regime. Based in London since then, Siti’s experience of exile feeds off his work, which at times can be read as a poetic observation of the rapid changes in his native land after its stagnation from years of war.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Zilberman Gallery Archive
Walid Siti for his first solo exhibition in Germany presents “The Black tower” at Zilberman Gallery in Berlin with new works, some of them site-specific to the gallery space. Living in permanent exile exposes Walid Siti to the pains as well as the benefits of alienation, which have given him critical perspectives, self-awareness and a heightened sense of identity. “We live in a peculiar time, in one world, but in between many different realities. I am a product of these complexities. Despair, escape, hope and aspiration are reflected in my work. I have lived in different places, under different emotional conditions. This at times transient state of existence, enabled me to be a witness and carrier of memories of many changes and experiences that influenced differing emotions, of fear and despair, of injustice and oppression, but provided also some moments of hope and human understanding”. The tension between ruin and hope directs the tone of the exhibition. At play here are two oppositional forces. On the one hand darkness, confinement and destruction, which come to the fore in Walid Siti’s wounded sculptural objects, such as for example the sculptural piece “The Black Tower” (2016) after which this exhibition is named. These objects, smothered in heavy black paint combine architectural and other kinds of wreckage with the iconography of war and repression: toy plastic soldiers, barbed wire, and scorched earth. Together they highlight the machinery of armed conflict and the expendability of human life. On the other hand, there is always Siti’s longing for betterment, which is manifested in the returning visual trope of ladders, mountains, ziggurats and staircases. Installations such as “Joined Ladder” (2016), a white floor-to-ceiling open-ended ladder consisting of smaller ladders, and “Passage” (2016), a pigment print showing a close-up of a photograph the artist had taken of a cliff in Kurdistan emphasise movement, escape and possibility. As Walid Siti says “My work reflects and is related to what the Kurds have been through so in that sense maybe my work belongs more to that place. I feel I’ll never be able to detach myself from that experience and place because you have these ties with your family and friends, the people you left behind. So you always feel connected somehow, so what they go through, you feel. You can’t avoid sharing with them even though you’re far from them”.
Info: Curator: Nat Muller, Zilberman Gallery, Goethestraße 82, Berlin, Duration 14/1-15/2/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, http://zilbermangallery.com
