Artist Issam Kourbaj talks about his latest work inspired by his Syrian homeland

In five unique sites across London this month, miniature models of Syrian refugee camps – made from scraps of old books, maps, diaries and musical scores and ringed by a fence of burnt matches – have been calling attention to the humanitarian crisis brought on by the chaos of civil war. The artist behind Another Day Lost, Issam Kourbaj, grew up in the Druze mountains in south-west Syria, and his most recent work has been shaped by the pain he feels at his country’s catastrophic collapse.

“It’s my people, my culture, my language,” he says.

Kourbaj left Syria to study in 1985 and has not returned for many years, even before the outbreak of the violence. His latest work, which is being shown as part of the Shubbak Festival of Arab culture in London, is inspired by aerial images of refugee populations and by imagining what it must be like to live in a city of thousands of identical, anonymous units.

Visiting a camp would have given the work a different perspective, he says, but it might have been overwhelming. “I don’t know if emotionally I could be strong. It’s difficult to accept that I cannot return to the places where I left them. This is painful for me. Probably this [artwork] is another form of me realising, if you like, my own identity. Because for the last three years this is what I’m doing. In my landscape there is nothing but Syria.”

Another Day Lost began life nine months ago, Kourbaj says, when he started rescuing old books from skips, ripping them apart and painting black lines and Arabic script across them. The pages that became miniature “tents” contain references to themes such as migration, home, cooking and childhood. The empty pub, warehouse, churches and cultural centre chosen to house the installations correspond to the geographic positions of refugee populations outside Syria’s borders in Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraqi Kurdistan. The number of matches surrounding them represents a tally of the days that have passed since the start of the crisis. Kourbaj describes this image as “like a rope around someone’s neck, growing”, and says that the refugees are becoming “citizens of the tents”.

Original article by Jess Holland

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Artist Issam Kourbaj talks about his latest work inspired by his Syrian homeland