New worlds: how artists are being inspired by Europe's refugee crisis
From an Iranian artist’s creative reappraisal of Persian miniatures to a Syrian-Palestinian’s exploration of the memories of Syrian refugees, artists are using their work to highlight the human dimension of the crisis
As the words “migrant crisis” permeated daily conversation, and migrants became refugees became people fleeing for their lives in recent weeks, artworks that explore the darker side of the human condition are given a new context.
A sailing boat, with thin wooden masts and white sails rolled up, hovering against a darkened sea is from a series of revisited Persian miniatures that the Iranian artist Shahpour Pouyan is currently showing at London’s Copperfield Gallery in an exhibition entitled "History Travels at Different Speeds”.
Of the 16 miniatures in the show, the boat – titled God Sets the Course for the Ship and Not the Captain – is the one that stops you in your tracks. Pouyan sees a bleak metaphor for the refugees’ plight in the piece’s colours.
“Silver was used to paint water,” he says. “But the destiny of silver is to oxidise, to blacken. People are putting their lives into the hands of traffickers, who put the boats on autopilot and jump ship. The ships travel west with no captain or crew, but packed full of believers, literally entrusting their destiny to God.”
Pouyan has been reworking these classic miniature masterpieces since 2008. Using digital and manual manipulation, he removes all people from the artworks, then painstakingly recreates their landscapes. Yet the resulting images have an eerie emptiness to them. You go to many places, he says, places like Persepolis, emptied of people but pregnant with a sense of civilisation abandoned.