Kurdish artist’s works relive Syria massacres by Assad clan

BRUSSELS, Belgium - The massacres committed by two generations of the Assad family are a powerful theme in the vivid paintings of Bachar al-Issa, a Syrian Kurdish artist who has spent decades in exile in France.

There are the massacres of Aleppo, Homs and Hama by the regime of the late president Hafez al-Assad in the 1980s, when Issa went into hiding in Syria and then into exile with the help of Palestinian militants in neighboring Lebanon.

And then there are the massacres committed today by the regime of the former dictator’s son – Bashar -- which Issa has painted from authenticating videos obtained by France 24 television in Paris, where he has worked as an unpaid consultant.

"I had to watch every video of the massacres in Syria," Issa, 65, told Rudaw in a phone conversation from his home in the French capital.

"It was so hard, but I felt I had to do it. I felt I was reliving every massacre. I was watching these videos and I then painted what I saw," he said.

Issa has had more than 40 exhibitions in many European cities, including in Germany's Hanover in 2012, where he staged his most recent one, simply entitled "The massacres in Syria."

In 2011, Issa started a blog called Sourialiberté.com, or FreeSyria.com, where he writes articles and posts interviews with people and his paintings, which are all connected to the Syrian civil war that began the same year.

His paintings, the ones measuring one meter by one meter, sell for between 7,000 and 10,000 euros. He also says he is credited with having started a new school of art in Syria, becoming the first Syrian artist to introduce nature as the backdrop of paintings featuring people.

"I am a school of art in Syria. Nobody preceded me but many artists followed my steps," he said.

He does not give a separate name for each painting, instead naming series of paintings that follow a particular theme.

"My paintings usually are born from other paintings," he said.

He also introduced a new technique in which each painting is divided into squares, with a different scene in every square.

"When looking at the painting you see some scenes from up, some from down, some from the left and some from the right, as if there are four different people looking at the painting," the artist said.

"I paint with an eagle eye, as if I am on top of a high building and I paint what is below me.”

Issa explained that people usually become artists when they draw inspiration from a teacher or another artist. But his case was more unusual, because there were no other artists in Syria to learn from.

In 1961, he moved with his brother to Dirbassiyah, a village on the border with Turkey, to study at the Armenian school. He had to walk 15 kilometers every Thursday to return home to his family in Bab-Assalam.

It was from these walks that he found the inspiration for his first paintings.

"The trip I used to make weekly on foot between Dirbassiyah and Bab-Assalam made me cross six villages, three valleys and many hills. On my right I had the Taurus mountains in Turkey and on my left the desert," the painter continued.

What fascinated him were the colorful, peasant clothing of the women who worked in the cotton and wheat fields under a bright sun, the enchanting mix of people and nature that he still reproduces in his paintings.

"I got influenced by the place and the environment I lived in during my childhood, whether it was the colors, shapes or forms. And I am saturated with them to the point that I still paint them even now in Paris," he said.

In 1966, Issa moved to Hassaka to study at the teacher’s college, while pursuing his passion for painting. Three years later, while teaching, he started to study history by correspondence at the faculty of literature in Damascus.

Between 1970 and 1977, Issa was transferred to teach at 30 different schools in rural villages because the ruling Baath Party transferred people when they were unhappy with their political affiliations: Issa was a communist activist.

Yet, because of these moves, he formed a deeper attachment to his Kurdish culture.

Since Kurdish was not taught at the public schools and Kurdish schools were prohibited, Kurdish culture grew through an oral rather than a written tradition.

"A Kurdish person in a rural village at night will drink tea and tell stories and that is why Kurdish songs, dance, stories and kelims developed a lot," he said.

Such a reserve of memories from his childhood and youth is fertile ground for his paintings, including those about Kurdish mythology.

But during unrest in 1980, the Syrian government arrested many activists, forcing him into hiding in June of that year.

It was during that period, while staying holed up in cellars, seeing virtually no one, that he began his series of paintings named "the massacres of the 80s."

"The details in those paintings show that I had a lot of time on my hands and each painting took a few days to finish," he said, adding he used very thin brush strokes to paint vivid scenes of horror.

It was time for him to leave Syria.

The Fateh faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization got him a fake ID card that took him to Syrian-occupied Lebanon, where he found work as a director at a firm doing graphic design.

In March 1984, Issa finally reached Paris after staying briefly in Cyprus and Algeria.

In France he borrowed money and opened a graphic company named "Adad" that he ran until 1995, when he started dedicating himself to painting. In 2000, he opened his own art gallery in Paris, called "Lorizon."

When asked about the Kurdish situation in Syria, Issa, who was always very active in his political struggle, envisions a future free Kurdistan open to other cultures and groups.

"I do not consider Kurdistan as the country for the Kurds only but for the Kurdistani people: the Muslims, the Christians, the Yazidis and so on," he said.

"The Kurds, once liberated, should set an example due to all the persecutions and the injustices they endured and should not try to get rid of the other identities," he believes.

"The Kurdish rifle should be to defend all of Syria. The Kurdish rifle is a liberation rifle, for defending and not attacking -- unlike what Daesh, Jabhat al-Nusra and Bashar al-Assad are doing."