Ruya Foundation invited Justine Hardy, author and trauma psychologist to speak at a panel discussion on art, conflict and Iraq, for the opening of the Pavilion of Iraq at the 56th Venice Biennale. Hardy founded the groundbreaking mental health project Healing Kashmir, and has reported on and written about South Asia for over 20 years. As a mental health specialist, she spoke about art in relation to conflict and the psychological damage of violence.
Cars, pets, fruit and flowers. Plasticine figures by children and teenagers living in Camp Shariya, Dohuk, as part of Ruya Foundation’s art therapy project in Iraq’s refugee camps. Photo: Ruya Foundation.
I am not in the art world, but I have watched what happens to art and artists in the face of war and violence. All the World’s Future’s, the theme of this Biennale, and Invisible Beauty, the Iraq Pavilion‘s interpretation, are both highly apposite to the idea of art in conflict.
Justine Hardy at the panel discussion on art, conflict and Iraq, at the 56th Venice Biennale. Photo: Ayman al-Amiri.
Violence destroys our sense of a future. To survive we tap into the brilliance of our evolutionary design shutting down the mind from everything except survival: fight and flight. The nuanced realm in which art dwells has little space to breathe. People are bludgeoned psychologically and physically. Everything is erased—sometimes randomly, sometimes systematically.
This blank canvas can be extraordinarily manipulated, but what lies within us – this idea of invisible beauty – is, in my experience, very individual. It’s in this privacy of our own free thoughts that we can reclaim ourselves.
In the machine of war […] art becomes a place of secrecy, a tiny pocket of private freedom.
The nature of violence destroys the self. It raises the great existential question: What is the point? How can there be one in the face of so much devastation? Destruction destroys both the sense of future, and of hope.
And so one of the places where we can begin to find ourselves again is through the artistic medium.
When children are trying to make sense of things that are beyond their understanding, they will usually try and work it out within the context that they do know and understand. When you put a piece of paper in front of a child who is going through violence, they won’t necessarily draw the violence. They are more likely to draw what is familiar to them, and indeed what makes them feel safe. In the context of where I work, children draw the mountains of the Himalayas, the lakes of Kashmir, the boats, trees, flowers and apple orchards. They’ll draw a house in the way that they want to live in a house – with a roof that’s safe and where the walls are secure, with windows that haven’t been smashed. Their psyches are reaching out for a place where it feels safe again. It is only really when a feeling of safety has been created around the child that they will begin to portray aspects of the violence.
A house, by children in Camp Shariya, Dohuk, June 2015. Photo: Ruya Foundation.
This idea of art in conflict, is that a paradox in itself? Is it possible for art to exist in conflict? Or is what we see a set of imposed ideas that are used as a way of manipulating or as a tool of propaganda? I’m not an artist who has tried to create in the face of violence but what I have seen is artists having that professional label of artist taken away. They are drummed into the machine of war, perhaps as servants of government or in any role that enables them to survive. Where they can dwell with their art becomes a place of secrecy, a tiny pocket of private freedom: perhaps the Polish prisoner in the German Nazi concentration camp playing a Bach aria on a piece of timber, a railway sleeper that he has been trying to carry, the lumpen wood momentarily transformed into a keyboard, his mind free in the moment; or maybe a child in Zaatari camp in Jordan, or in a camp in Iraq, Syria, anywhere else, who simply draws a house because it represents a place, a moment in which they can begin to reclaim themselves. .
I’m uncomfortable with some of the ideas of what art can do to represent war, because surely it can only ever be the idea of the individual artist? And do we have the right to impose individual ideas of war as representative of communities or whole groups of people?
I watch as art is used as a reconnection point, the bridge, between the destruction of self, and the beginning of some sense of future, of hope. It seems that in this reclamation of the soul art is reborn.